Final Countdown...

One of England's many greats. Matthews, Finney, Charlton, Moore, Hurst, Sinton etc...

Keen readers of this blog will have noted I started off writing about the EUROs and then just stopped.

Frankly, I couldn't be arsed.

I say 'couldn't be arsed' in attempt to pass it off cooly, as if actually, what I was doing was hanging around a swimming pool with all the other podders, vloggers, bloggers and tik-tokkers, tweeters and whatever other ghastly manifestations there are of the horrible phenonoma of 'fan-media' 

I wasn't. The other 'content creators' don't invite me to such events anyway because I'm misanthropic and spoil the party by saying things like 'who the fuck actually wants to read/watch the absolute shit we produce?' and 'I hate it when people say 'guys' online' and 'isn't it fucking annoying when people say 'I'm not gonna lie' before saying something that isn't something you'd lie about anyway like 'I'm not gonna lie, Mainoo has been really good' and 'shouldn't we just pour petrol on the internet and burn all the absolute septic ill informed bilge we come out with?'

Also, I'd probably tell that Bolton kid who is dead posh to fuck off cos he's basically everything that's wrong with the modern world and he's probably got a bouncer or something by now because people must surely get pissed off with him turning up at random games and braying really loudly about himself so that wouldn't go well probably. 

I haven't been scrappng with Thogdog or whatever he's called. Mundanely, I've been really busy and writing a chirpy blog on how the Austrian manager resembles someone who might walk their dog on private land in a slightly provocative and self important way wasn't really appealing to me.  Anyhow, I'm writing the blog now so it's all gravy.

He'd have a really big dog and he wouldn't pick up its mess.

Quite a lot of water has passed under the bridge since the last one. We've gone through the entire spectrum of options between 'England are fucking shite and Southgate has the football acumen of a brain damaged potato' to 'England are going to win the thing and Southgate is a zenlike monk of tactical patience who has played the long game to perfection' 

I'm not sure where I sit. Who cares to be honest. Whatever I think (which is probably that he's pretty good at some things and very much less good at others) is going to have no impact on whether we win - and the fact that we played pretty well for the 35 minutes that Holland the Netherlands attacked us is a good sign. That's probably just idiotic optimism and the fact Spain look at least twice as good as anyone we've played (and for that matter, us) is a little tiny bit of a concern. 

It is clear that England have struggled to break down teams and that to a greater or lesser extent, everyone we've played to date have tried to be compact and hit us on the break. The one team who didn't do that was the Dutch (for a bit) and we managed (almost literally) to create more chances in that short spell alone than we've carved out in the tournament as a whole up to that point. Spain will not put 9 behind the ball and play off their striker. In essence, it's the difference between us (Blackpool) playing Portsmouth and Bolton vs playing Port Vale and Cheltenham. 

Slovakia

People will bang on about years of hurt and all that but if we lose to Spain, we've lost to the best team at the tournament. I'm not really a massive fan of the way we play but then, it's been a lot more successful than that time we picked a fun gung-ho manager to play football for the sheer love of playing football and he had to resign cos we were shit. Whether we like Gareth or not, England have more or less punched their weight throughout his tenure and that's not been true for a long time. 

The years of hurt haven't really been the defeats anyway. They've been the stupid self defeating actions that have come before them. Imagine having Chis Waddle and Peter Beardsley at your disposal. Imagine binning them off just because... Imagine not picking either Paul Gascoigne or Matt Le Tissier because you don't trust players who score goals and dribble past people? Imagine a world where Steve Mclaren is the best manager in the country. Imagine producing a genius like Clough and never giving him a go at the job (and so on) 

Like Grealish... but loads better... (and Grealish is good) - the players who were picked instead were people like Tony Daley and Andy Sinton. 

Well done EVERYONE. What a nation. Brings a tear of pride to the eye.

Gareth got the job by accident. He got the job at a point where the question 'who the fuck is going to do this cos no one actually wants it?' was a valid one. In a way, he's a latter day Walter Winterbottom - an amenable FA man who essentially serves as a placeholder and yet, bizarrely it's worked in a way that Walter never did. What he's produced is an England team.

The important point here is 'team.' We can all think back to multiple tournaments (and for that matter qualifiers) where England have just been a collection of blokes who happen to wear the same shirt and look at each other as if they're surprised to see their teammates and confused about their collective purpose. 

Yer actual Walter Winterbottom. Literally just a bloke who carried the balls and collected the subs whilst some butchers and such picked his team. Pure mentalism. 

We've never really had that manager that united the nation since 66 anyway. Revie buggered off for cash. Greenwood didn't do a lot. Everyone hated Robson until the last tournament and he has been the subject of spectacular misty eyed revisionism as if he was the nation's beloved twinkly eyed grandad for his entire reign. Taylor, Keggy and Mclaren were abject. El Tel was fun, but he'd already basically gone by the time we did anything good under him. Hoddle was ok but no more and I've still not forgiven him for the 98 squad where God told him to pick battlers above everything else. Cheers God. On the 7th day you chilled out after making David Batty. Thanks for that. 

"Here's a good one Paul. Imagine if I dropped you AND Matty and just took a load of cloggers. Lol! Yeah, hahahahahahahaha. It's fucking hilarious innit? What sort of mentalist would go to the World Cup with no creative players? ROFL LOLCOPTER"

Sven didn't deliver on the promise that he hinted at. Capello was a car crash and gave off furious vibes all the time. Roy with his fancy CV and intellectual ways was an inevitable choice who ended in an inevitable way because no matter who he manages, he manages them like they're plucky underdogs, Big Sam didn't put a foot wrong in his reign apart from that time he had to resign after a single game cos of dodgy dealings. It's worth remembering that we've also had (*checks notes*) Peter Taylor, Howard Wilkinson Stuart Pearce and Joe Mercer in the hotseat at one point or another... 

If only it had worked... 

Up until Ramsey, England didn't even try to play international football. Quite literally, their approach was to appoint a PE teacher as trainer and to pick the team via a committee of (yes, really) business men. When they finally realised that had to change and we weren't actually going to get anywhere by throwing names in a hat and playing tactics 20 years outdated, we turned to Alf. We obviously remember the final, but Ramsay didn't serve up beautiful football. That wasn't his genius. He dragged us, by force of will into a position where we were tactically adept, where we had a plan and a coherency. Even the greatest manager of our history wasn't really flavour of the month for much of his reign. Much of what was thrown at Southgate was thrown at him too.  

This... really... happened. (For context, Taylor's last job was the football heavyweights of Maldon and Tiptree)

The point is, aside from the odd month here and there, the odd game where it all went right, the odd blip, it's been an almost never ending parade of disappointment and low level grumbling. We've very rarely had 'the right man' and even when we have, it's not lasted very long. 

As we've already said - if it wasn't Gareth, who the fuck would it be? No one any good wants the job. It would either be some clapped out coach who was good a decade ago or some FA coaching badge nobody. Gareth isn't the best manager in world football, but the best managers in world football don't want the England job. It's too much hassle and not enough football. Who would do it if he didn't? 

No.. but seriously, it would obviously be Frank. 

If I'm honest, (and I'm not gonna lie) this time round, I've enjoyed other teams more than England. Georgia were great fun, Turkey were excellent and played a wonderful brand of chaotic and aggressive football, Austria were good, the Swiss were probably the best 'team' outside of Spain, they looked balanced and really well coached, a proper unit that were unlucky to lose to us to be honest. Germany played some really flamboyant football and looked blisteringly good at points. All of that doesn't matter though. They're out.

The other team that has provided a lot of pleasure is Spain. We might be deluding ourselves with the narrative that 'Gareth has measured this run perfectly' - We might be making up some self serving mumbo jumbo about 'tournament football' being about winning ugly and saving the performances till later on (on the one hand, I'm not sure Brazil 70 did that but then equally, the Dutch in 74/78 played sexy football and lost at the end so who knows?) 

Can we beat them? 

Of course we can. 

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