Hodgson: nice man, wrong planet

By Tony Attwood

Poor Roy.  Everyone says how nice he is.  At all the clubs he has conducted himself correctly and reasonable.  So WTF is he doing managing the utterly unmanageable England?  Or come to that working for the appalling Fifa-ingratiating racist by association, FA.

He talks about how Premier League players for whom international breaks are holidays.

Come on Mr Roy.  What do you expect?  You are working for an organisation that thinks it is a Good Thing to be associated with an organisation that has Blatter as a leader.  Don’t worry about Ferdinand in Qatar – everyone’s going to Qatar, haven’t you heard?  They are buying football, for goodness sake.

The fact is that if you work for the FA, then you give up all decencies and reasonableness because if the FA had an ounce of reasonableness or morality they would stand up and say “no” to Fifa.   All it takes is for one country to say “no” and other decent countries would follow.  But by being part of the deal England is tarred with the racist brush of Fifa, and so, Mr H, sadly, are you, decent guy though you are.

According to the press, the England manager has said that clubs and players show a lack of commitment to international football.  Of course they bloody well do.  The clubs pay the players and let their players go, and get them back crocked and broken.  How many times did that happen to Arsenal because we tried to play by the rules

It is strange what happens to men who become England manager.  A few of them talk a little sense before getting the job, but then curl up and die intellectually the moment they get into office.  Mr Hodgson, speaking at the Soccerex European Forum, for example, said, “What worries me is that clubs need international football.”  Oh diddly poodles.

Of course they don’t need it.  The big clubs hate it.  They don’t want it, they don’t need it, they would sooner drop their players in boiling fat.  They wish it did not exist.  He also said, clubs “suggest international football should be relegated to a lesser stage because the clubs have the Champions League and championships to aim for.”

No Mr Hodgson.  We suggest the total utter nonsense of international football should be banned, removed, stopped.  It is run by a corrupt organisation that has no place on the Earth, let alone telling us which players we can have.  It is childish, stupid, pathetic, pointless and worthless.  And racist.

“These breaks are being seen as the 10-day break that you don’t always get during the season,” said Mr H.  No boss, they are seen as terror centres, moments in which the player whose salary the club has paid all season, and who is central to the attempt to get a place in Europe, avoid relegation or anything else.  “It concerns me that we are guilty of accepting it’s the international break so we can give the player 10 days off to go to Dubai. I would still like to see the international break being a time when players go to play for their international teams, and it is seen as an important time,” quoth he.

No Mr H.  We used to think that, but then all of us grew up.  We now see international as part of Fifa, and thus part of the racist corruption which runs our sport.  If there was any justice anywhere in the world there would be none of this nonsense.  Fifa would have been thrown out long ago, and we would have club football run by the clubs for the supporters.

“If you’re a club manager now you’ve got no excuse,” continued the once sensible and rather nice Mr H.  “Uefa are putting an end to the friendly debate by putting them in clearly defined international dates so you can quite easily plan your time around these blocks. If your players need a rest it’s not obligatory that it has to be during the international break. It can be done during the other 40-odd weeks of the year when they are with their clubs.”

Bollocks and tripe.  This whole argument forgets who pays the bill.  What Mr H is saying is that the bill-payer should rest the player in his own time, rather than when the insane, demented and utterly absurd FA wants the player.

And there’s more.  “I grew up in a generation when playing for your national team at any level was vitally important. But even at under-20s level now you have a lot of withdrawals. These are not key figures for their clubs. I cannot understand what precludes a young player from helping England at any level.”   Well, Mr H. if you can’t understand what is happening in football, surely you should stand down.  Isn’t it a prerequisite of any of us running an organisation that we actually understand what our staff and customers are thinking?  How can you possibly continue in your job when you say you don’t understand what we, the paying public, think of your truly awful employers.

Players are withdrawn from national teams because repeatedly national teams have shown themselves to be incapable of managing the resources that they have.  National associations that affiliate to Fifa (which is almost all of them) are associated with a totally corrupt organisation whose members should be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

Meanwhile G Neville said at the same meeting that England doesn’t do well in internationals because of the number of foreign players in the Premier League.

So Mr N what should we do?  Withdraw from the EU?  An arbitrary closure of frontiers? No trade with the world?

We are in fantasy land.  So here’s the whole quote: “Is talent not being produced or is the pathway being blocked? For me, it is because the pathway is blocked,” said Neville. “You’re not telling me there isn’t another Gary Neville out there in Manchester, another Nicky Butt, Darren Fletcher, Tom Cleverley or Danny Welbeck. We have to get more English players in the Premier League. I think the ratio is 35% now. In Spain it is 63% Spanish. That sounds about right.

“You have Cristiano Ronaldo at Real Madrid and [Lionel] Messi at Barcelona but in the Spanish league 63% of their players are still Spanish. We’ve gone too far in England. We’re maybe 20% off. We need to give chances to our own. We can’t go back to having no foreign players, the league is better for them, but the tipping point in terms of the numbers of players, managers and coaches has gone too far and we are harming ourselves a little bit.”

OK so let’s reinforce the boundaries and all be nationalists.  Because look the FA is wonderful…

David Bernstein, the outgoing chairman of the FA, has said the FA may not implement Uefa’s proposal of a 10-match minimum ban for players found guilty of racist abuse. Of course not.  Because the FA is racist by association.

Bernstein said: “We wouldn’t necessarily get to the same solution as Uefa. It’s not a race to be first past the post; we’ll do it at our own pace in our own way. I’m delighted Uefa have come up with this strong penalty and I fully support them doing it – but English football must come to its own decision in its own time, which will be very soon.”

Right on sunshine.  Let’s all go to hell together.

The books…

• Woolwich Arsenal: The club that changed football – Arsenal’s early years
• Making the Arsenal – how the modern Arsenal was born in 1910
• The Crowd at Woolwich Arsenal FC: crowd behaviour at the early matches