It is the most nerve wracking day of the season. A vast array of mindless pointless “international” friendlies in which our players can play and be injured. There’s no benefit, nothing happens – except hamstrings go, knees get knocked and the Spanish practice their racial taunting.
In one way we can feel pleased for Clichy and Flamini entering the international arena – and for them to appalling awfulness of the scenario will not yet be apparent. They will have seen van Persie’s season destroyed by an “international” but just how career sapping this can be won’t come home to them until they too get an injury while on what is laughingly called their international “duty”.
Meanwhile England play. But of course it isn’t England. It is a group of guys who either were born in England, or who have lived in England for five years, or one of whose parents were born in England, or one of whose grandparents were born in England.
So it is quite possible that one of these great “sons of England” was born in Bolivia of a mother who was Peruvian and a father who was Dutch, but whose grandmother on his father’s side gave birth in England because her plane back to Germany was delayed, the contractions started and she was rushed into hospital. That’s how English you have to be.
What’s worse they are going to play on a pitch that has been so utterly awful that the notion of passing along the ground is quite impossible. OK it may be better today – I won’t know because I shall be going out for a dance rather than wasting any time watching – but certainly in the past it has been a disgrace.
However there is a solution to this “England” tripe. England games attract supporters from lower divisions. So why not introduce a rule that says that to play for “England” you not have to have at least one distant relative who happened to stop over in England, you also have to play in the Championship, or a lower league.
What this would do is raise the profile of the Championship, encourage wanna-be Englanders to play for Championship squads, and maybe even reduce some of the insane hysteria that surrounds the matches. If other countries follow suit then those of us who quite enjoy the Champions League can get on and do so, while those who like to watch England being beaten by countries about one twentieth of our size, whose players play outside their country, and whose league is really rather dull, can go and watch England. I hope Senderos doesn’t get hurt cos we are short of centre halves.
Thanks to the lovely people at www.goonernews.com for helping us to build this daily blog. Yesterday over 2000 different people came to the site – not bad for a blog that’s only been going three weeks. If you would like to read about the criminal activities of the people who run England go to http://www.emiratesstadium.info/football_association.htm Or if you want to know just how incredibly amazing our predictive ability is (and I mean that without the slightest element of irony) go to http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/2008/01/page/7/
