Blowing Away the Cobwebs

It’s now two and a half months until the Euro 2016 football championships kick off in France and it looks like the media frenzy building up the England football team has already started. This has followed the same pattern for much of the last 50 years since the England team actually won anything (which my Scottish compatriots will never hesitate to point out was due to home advantage and a dodgy linesman). This time they are buoyed by what was a very impressive friendly win Berlin against Germany (although also aided by a dodgy linesman) but for once I can understand the excitement but probably not for the same reasons.

The biggest problem that the England team seems to face is players who do not really want to play. These seem to come in two varieties: either they are always but *always* injured when it comes to an international friendly match that falls mid-season or they are fêted in the media as remarkable talents and expect to play and be picked whenever there is a match in the offing. The classic example of this was a few years ago when we were promised a golden generation of footballing talent. It turned out that this “golden generation” were, in fact, a bunch of egotistical journeymen who were constantly found wanting against even the most mediocre of opposition.

This is where I start to have a great deal of sympathy with a lot of my rugby and cricket loving friends. In these sports, playing for the national side is the absolute pinnacle of players’ careers and they would never treat an international match as a sideshow, irritation or merely a promotional vehicle for their media careers: at least they wouldn’t do that if they ever wanted to play for their country again. In the past week we have had the usual array of last minute injuries and withdrawals from the England football squad. What we were eventually left with was a fairly inexperienced team of players from the less fashionable clubs playing with absolute passion and joy for the chance to represent their national team against the reigning World champions in one of the world’s great sporting arenas. Regardless of the result it made for a fantastic spectacle  for the armchair fan at home.

In a few weeks’ time the national coaches will have to pick their squads for the Euros and I hope that Roy Hodgson takes note. When he picks players who really want to be there when their country needs them rather than when it suits them they actually play rather well. Above all, they actually play as a team rather than a group of disparate prima donnas ambling around the pitch expecting the entire universe to revolve about their whims. From what I saw with England's victory last night there is ample enough talent to blow the last few golden cobwebs away.