A blueprint for English victory.

Just like that, another chapter in England's catalogue of failure is written. Once again, a nation breathes in, ready to let out a primal scream of joy and instead all that is emitted is a collective long sigh. Rather than gazing on a trophy lift, there is just a thousand yard stare into nothingness. 

It's always thus. We're never good enough. We always fall short, always lack something in the final showing. Damp eyed idols who've run out of time to claw it back. A manager stripped of purpose wandering about a pitch that seems huge in defeat, consoling his men, in sore need of consolation himself. A post match interview where forcing him to talk at this point borders on the inhumane. 

In the dark days of the late 80s, we bemoaned a lack of of technique. Our game, we said, has become outmoded. England is wedded to its island status, a football pariah that has become isolated in its belief that an up and at em' physical ruggedness is enough to conquer the world. We told ourselves that maybe if we did what the Dutch do, trained kids how to pass and move, then, in 15 years time, we'd be brilliant. As the Premier League has steadily turned into a global super league, that idea has become less and less realistic - we're all so much more Pep than Don Howe these days and no stone is left unturned in the attempt to find football ability and turn it into a footballing commodity. We've had to come up with a wide variety of other reasons to explain it all away. 

We don't produce managers, we've got too many foreign players, we've not got enough left sided players, all the good players want to play the same position, not enough academies, too many academies, we don't care enough, we care too much, the manager's job is too high pressure, we don't give the managers job to the right people, the manager's job is not wanted by anyone... 

There will now be another inquest, another hand wringing exercise, another set of futile attempts to find a reason for what is increasingly seeming like a permanent state of being - forever doomed to hope, forever facing the cold dawn of defeat with downcast eyes and slumped shoulders. England players sat on their haunches, bleakly comforting each other, stuck with the knowledge that glory has once again slipped from their grasp. No matter what we do, we end up with Jordan Pickford, head in his big white gloves. 

We can argue that 'we've actually done well' sometimes, but really over the course of time, we haven't. We are one of the largest European nations. Only Russia and Turkey can be accused of managing to leverage their populace more ineffectively than we have. Put it this way, if we take Italy, Spain and France as countries roughly analagous to us, then they have, since 1966, won a combined total of 10 European Championships and 8 World Cups.  Add in the fact that countries with far fewer resources than us (Netherlands, Portugal, Greece, Denmark, Czechoslovakia) have won stuff too and it's grim reading. 

Perhaps they had it right back in the day. It's not gung-ho nationalism to declare that the UK is the birthplace of football. It's a fact that sober reading can unearth. When you trace back the origins of the game across the world, it is almost always an expat from Scotland or England who has set up a team somewhere and it's slowly spread from there. How nations play to this day is influenced by whether it was the Scottish passing game (or, to be truly accurate, the northen English/Glaswegian 'combination game' approach) or the amateur English rugged approach that was a key influence. (Strangely, this doesn't seem to extend to Scotland themselves...) 

Jimmy Hogan, one particularly notable example of an Englishman who coached other countries to become better than us. 

We didn't play anyone more exotic than Ireland (then under 'Home Rule') until 1908. When we did, we ran up a collective score of 28-2 over 4 games against Austria, Bohemia and Hungary. The following year, 3 games against Austria and Hungary yielded a similar one sided English dominance. It was a full 21 years till we lost a game to the foreigners - A 4-3 defeat in Madrid which the press largely ignored and England, for reasons that are lost to the mists of time, picked a non-league player (Edgar Kail of Dulwich Hamlet) despite the professional game being in a rugged health and boasting 4 divisions by this point in time. Spain were managed by an Englishman (Fred Pentland) so all in all, we could probably chalk this off as 'one for the experience' and 'a lesson to ourselves in the foolishness of showing Johnny Foreigner what to do' 

When the World Cup was set up, England approached it with disdain. We didn't enter the first 3, content to play the Home Championship and friendly matches as suited us. This, effectively allowed us to draw the curtains and ignore the rest of the world and their unsporting evolution of the game.

Happily enough, in 1931, we beat Spain 7-1 at Highbury putting to rest any idea that a culture with a siesta and funny hats was better at football than one with meat and potato pies and flat caps. Unhappily though, in that same year, we lost to a team that eat snails and frogs legs in Paris, going down 5-2 despite the debut (and debut goal) of one of my favourite named football players of all time, Pongo Waring of Aston Villa. 

Again though, we managed to straighten things out, beating the stinking soft cheese merchants with a good old display of hard cheddar sharpness and roaring to a 4-1 victory in 1933, with 2 goals for George Camsell, player who should be better remembered than he is - not only did he score 59 goals in one season (unfortunately for him, the same season Dixie Dean scored 60) but he hit 18 goals in only 9 games for England, a ration that makes Kane look, frankly, a bit shit. 

By now though, a pattern was emerging. It would be a further 20 years until the famous Wembley defeat of 1953 but during the 30s we also lost to Hungary, the Czechs, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. All away from home. 

At home we were still invincible though - a fact, proven beyond any doubt, by a 1938 victory over 'the rest of Europe' - a far more efficient process to find the best team in Europe than playing loads of games all over the place. Just have one game and invite Europe to 'come and have a go if it thinks it's hard enough' and see it off with plucky English zeal. Sorted. 

Only ill-informed people say we've never won the Euros! 

England then, of course, played 'the rest of Europe' on a bigger stage which somewhat interrupted the flow of the game for a few years. Fans of metaphors could look to the paragraph above and construct one themselves. 

When we finally entered the World Cup (1950), we sent a scratch team of whoever we could be bothered to send with no real thought behind it. We'd decided, it wasn't worth picking Matthews for the group matches. We lost to the USA but then, we hadn't really tried so it didn't matter. Anyway, they couldn't come over and beat us on our own soil and with our best players could they? 

We also lost to Ireland in 1949, but that was Ireland so it didn't count. When in 1953, we played Hungary and lost heavily at Wembley in a game that would become to be considered a legendary turning point for English tactics and mindset, some of the press (quite literally) described Hungary's tactic of swapping positions and moving into unusual areas (between the lines in today's hipster parlance) as 'unsporting behaviour' and praised England for 'keeping their positions' and 'playing the game as it should be' - We can be assured that had the Hungarians played us at our own game, not one they'd deviously invented, we'd definitely have triumphed. 

Not long after that Hungary game, the above truth was borne out. Wolves played the mighty Honved side that contained the majority of the Hungarian wizards. Wolves won. The victory was in no small part down to the fact that the side in old gold ordered the Molyneux pitch to be watered so heavily it resembled a bog. On the rutted and saturated surface, they tamed the Hungarian passing game and shelled their goal. Good old English physicality won out. England declared themselves champions of the world once more.  

I think there's a lot to be said for that attitude to be honest. 

Instead of yet another inquest into how and why we don't match up, I'm advocating a self protective isolationism. I'm advocating a return to the Home Championship. A game at Hampden, a game in Cardiff, a game at Windsor Park and a game at Wembley. Best of Britain. 

Fuck the rest. Let them 'evolve' the game to their hearts content. Let them have their perversions. Their sweepers and their 'no10s' and their undisciplined movement that masquerades as 'tactical fluidity' 

We invented this torture for ourselves. It's our own fault. We could have kept football for ourselves. No one makes us enter these so called 'tournaments' anyway.  What is 'FIFA' really? 'UEFA'? It's not as catchy or definitive as 'The FA' is it? We don't have to keep doing this. We can surely beat Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland at least sometimes. The Home Championship is the oldest of them all and have Spain or France or Italy or Argen-bloody-tina or Brazil with their stupid beach football samba game ever won that? 

No. 

Lets bin off all this fawning over the flim flam of continental football. Let them venerate skill and movement, let them have their fancy diets and their psychology and all that. Lets go back to big centre halves smashing into big centre forwards with bone crunching force. Lets occasionally invite a scratch team of foreigners to play us, but with our own referee and lets plough the pitch before hand so they can't play in their suspicious and frankly ludicrously effete manner, prancing about with their fashionable hair styles and wearing designer suits on the touchline. We'll stick to our own principles instead of trying to ape others. Big lads up front and galloping wingers to feed them. We can launch it long and Michael Ricketts can bundle the ball over the line from a loopy Steve Guppy cross and we'll all celebrate with warm beer and a capstan, chucking our caps in the air and shouting 'hurrah!' and '3 cheers for the king' 

Could have been an all time great had we not lost our way somewhere...

It's the future. 

No more pain.

Until next time. 

Onward

Tweet 

You can follow MCLF on facebook or Twitter or use Follow.it to get posts sent to your email If you appreciate the blog and judge it worth 1p or more, then a donation to one of the causes below which help kids and families in Blackpool would be grand. 

Home-Start Blackpool Food Bank