When I say “won”, what I mean of course is “survived”.
Euro Whatnot Thing has been and gone and none of our team has been injured. We were helped by the fact that some countries got knocked out early, some of our players were injured anyway and so didn’t get there, and our two superstars, Van Persie and Cesc were given only bit parts.
And that two of our great French players didn’t even get on the plane.
Even better news is that Vela has survived playing for Mexico without an injury.
So, that’s the great news. The bad news is that it now seems ok to forget that a manager is an out and out racist if he wins a European Championship thing. Seems a bit unreasonable to me. The manager of Spain called Henry a “black shit” and then refused to apologise. It made the press for a while, but now everyone worships the self-same guy because his team done ok.
Not quite the sort of world I would like to live in, but since (as is regularly pointed out in emails to me) I am on another planet anyway, it doesn’t really matter.
I suppose.
Spain won the tournament despite the manager not because of him. He is manager of a team of talented players with a few individuals (Cesc et.al) that can run a game with or without any management. With that group of players playing the way they did, they would still have won it with Martin Jol at the helm.
He may be a racist, but if he hates black players so much why pick Senna to start every game?