As Beckenbauer said, the English have learnt nothing under Fabio, as they still kick the ball aimlessly forward in the air.
Here’s the Latest Results from the World Cup: Viva Espana!
English Premiertwits 0 Rest of the World 30
What’s the difference between Wayne “I’m saving all my goals for the world cup” Rooney, Wright-Phillips, Lampard, Heskey, Terry, Jo Cole and the unmentionable Ashley Cole, (or for that matter Drogba, Anelka, Silva and Torres), of the Premiership, AND Muller, Sneijder, Villa, Forlan, Higuain, Klose and Vittek of the Rest of the World?
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Answer:
1. These Premiertwits play in the English Premiership and the Rest don’t.
2. These Premiertwits scored no goals in the world cup, while all the Rest bagged 138.
3. These Premiertwits only scored with their WAGS, or possibly each other’s.
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4. All Premiertwits are paid up to twice as much as the Rest.
If we add England’s two actual scorers, Gerrard and Defoe to the Premiertwits’ list, and Suarez and Puyou to the Rest, the result is infinitesimally better in percentage terms for the Premiertwits:
English Premiertwits 2 Rest of the World 34
The inclusion of these two semi-heroes, who actually tried and displayed skill, raises the English Premiertwits ratio from 0.0 recurring to an eye-watering, as in tears, 6% total strike ratio.
Other less than gallant losers were FIFA and the FA. FIFA’s policy of refusal to introduce technology went Sopp Splatt (Ged’it?) when three teams were wrongly eliminated by false refereeing.
The FA did even better, however, and scored a giant £12,000,000 own goal, when they, believing all their own hype, arm-wrestled the English manager, Fabio Capello, into striking out their own get-out clause from his contract: then Fabio turned out as the biggest loser of the tournament, selecting the wrong squad, picking the wrong teams and substitutes, playing them out of position, with no tactics and no zest to win, but the FA cannot now get rid of him for two years, at a cost of another £6.0 million p.a. to them, but happily trousered by the Loser who, with his bumbling English, promptly fled off on holiday to spend his ill-gotten moolah abroad.
As Beckenbauer said, the English have learnt nothing under Fabio, as they still kick the ball aimlessly forward in the air, hoping that one of their own players can somehow get it back to earth without pulling a hamstring, control it, turn the defender without breaking a metatarsal, and hopefully head off goalwards, on his own like Roy of the Rovers, in an old game called Bootball, as last played in the first half of the last century.
The Germans and the Spanish – what a semi-final, settled only by the Barcelona Bullet’s header, in a much better game than the final! – play the ball on the ground and into space so that their forwards are outrunning the defence and facing the goal at the same time: they play ‘pass and move, pass and move again’, while the English look skyward like a bunch of WW1 Royal Observer Corps spotters waiting for the ball to come back to earth and hit them on the head.
And they had something else that England didn’t have: tactics. The Germans moved to score with four passes out of defense, played on the ground, in the style of the Blitzkrieg or ‘lightning attack’, while the Spanish artists played chess with the ball among themselves, denying possession and tiring out their foes, as they moved to open up the final through-ball into space.
Both approaches were brilliantly successful, and left the BBC commentary team of former has-beens – Lineker, Hanson and Shearer – wide-eyed with amazement and practically speechless at how the Beautiful Game really is played these days.
The nearest thing to this style of football was last seen in the Premiership with the unbeaten Arsenal team of 2003/4, The Invincibles, who embraced first-time forward passing at speed and on the ground and are managed by a French gentleman, no less, and which team was stuffed full of continental players of renown, Bergkamp, Henry, Vieira and so on. (It only included one token “Englishman”, that wretched love-rat Ashley Cole.)
The only difference between the Invincibles and Spain’s side today is that the Spanish are just as happy to go backwards and pull the defenders out of position, before the lethal through-ball.
The prospect of the new Premiership season and even more endless bootball fills me with gloom: Liverpool and Manchester United from the down-trodden North-West are both owned by insolvent dollar-hungry Americans; Chelsea and Manchester City are both owned by multi-billionaire foreigners waving giant cheque books at other foreigners; Portsmouth and Southampton are both relegated and bust, as the money-splosh-around made the living too easy on the South Coast.
That’s on the field. Off it, Murdoch is tightening his grip on BSkyB, as he sits comfortably in New York and throttles the real fans in their own armchairs, who can no longer afford the price of a ticket to the ground. Football still hasn’t caught on to technology, unlike tennis, rugby, cricket and curling – remember last season’s offside goal by Drogba at Old Trafford, which meant Chelsea falsely beat Man U for the title, a false decision worth about £50 million?
Nationwide has dumped its £20 million sponsorship of the national team – who can blame them? – which could at least allow the fallen BP to step up unto the breach (Ouch! dear friends!) And Ashley Cole’s idea of still scoring offside goals doesn’t begin to make the back of the net bulge for at least nine months.
It can only get worse, like New Labour’s Lovie’s Lost economy: the Premiertwits are the next lot down the sink-hole of financial trouble and strife, in the bracing new era of our Cannibal Crossbow Chancellor, all as foretold by Paul, the unpaid all-knowing eight-tentacled cephalopod, born in Weymouth and now living in a tank in Munich.
