I have been in London for a week now and, until yesterday, I was having a great time. So much to do and so cheap. The great restaurants, the opera, the parks, the sunshine, the pubs, Wimbledon and great TV. Even coffee is still half the price it is in Nicosia. Maybe Ledra Street is just so much classier than Piccadilly. It must be; there is no other possible explanation.
Then England lost 4-1 to Germany and there is no point talking about anything else. It was potentially very embarrassing not beating USA but letting the Germans get 4 goals past us was a disaster. How will we ever hold our heads up again? We apparently don’t even make jokes about the war any more. And just how visually challenged were the match officials? Referees really do need technology to help them out or they deserve whatever abuse gets thrown at them when they disallow perfectly good goals; ones that cross the line by at least a metre and could have changed the outcome of a game. It would have been nice if the German goalie had owned up of course, but I guess that was never going to happen!
It was not the historically painful and heroically unfair exit of penalties but something far worse; England played rubbish. But why? No-one seems to have the answer to that question. I know everyone thinks that footballers and football fans in England are a bit thick. But even if that were true, it is not an excuse for the amount of drivel, by way of an explanation, that the media has bombarded us with for the last 24 hours. It seems that whenever strong emotions get involved, the intellect suffers. Maybe people who watch tennis don’t care enough but they seem to have no problem analysing bad performances in a tournament without resorting to inanities like ‘just not good enough.’ Why is it so difficult to have a sensible debate about the England football team?
The England players apparently have no technical ability, can’t pass, can’t keep possession, don’t care and are paid too much to win a tournament. All of these explanations are as ludicrous as the decision not to award Lampard’s goal. Of course they care. These footballers have probably dreamed of lifting a world cup since they were kids. That doesn’t change just because they are rich. And of course they have ability and loads of it. You don’t keep your place in top premiership teams like Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool, score goals week after week and regularly get to the final stages of Champions League with no ability. There is probably more individual ability in the England team than the German one. So what went wrong?
If Fabio and the players don’t know, who does? Maybe they are just not saying. There was something wrong in the England camp and the truth will out in time. For now, one thing that the whole country knows is that you can’t play footballers out of their regular team positions and expect them to perform the same way. And if something is not working, change it. That is called having some tactics. If we can’t have a manager who can get the best out of the team, can we just have David Beckham please? Maybe he could be a kind of figurehead manager like Maradonna and he looks good too!
