Premier League needs ‘rebooting to reset’ as England learn they can’t take Man City route to success
It seems decrying international football is popular. And all because you’ve been marketed a lie by the now invalid, ugly, stinking, football-warping Premier League meat grinder and its financial pantomime.
Get rid. Shut it down. It is and always was vapidly grotesque, with a sole aim to rob us of everything we held dear for its own profit while telling us it was for our own good and that our penury was wealth.
Don’t just relegate Manchester City, abolish them and take the nation state ownership with it. Start again, sin-free. We don’t need any of this oppressive, abusive, corrupt behaviour. We don’t want the filthy lucre. Does a new striker ever justify murder?
Because everything is affected, everything is sh*t-stained. Sleep with the devil and the devil will take you away. Everything you thought was great and worthwhile wasn’t. If you believed, you lied to yourself about it. Throw your medals in the bin, it’s all been a worthless charade. All tainted. Can’t take away the good times? Watch us. Winning the 100 metres by riding a motorbike. What an achievement. And didn’t we all actually think it was a load of corrupt horsesh*t all along? I know I did. Never sport, more spreadsheet. It was always taking the p*ss. Top-flight football will never recover from this without shutting down and rebooting to reset. A new year zero. Free of City and their rancid owners.
But the league is not the only fruit.
International football is enjoyable and the last repository of fairness in the elite game, where money can’t buy you success and no-one can leverage their finances to assert dominance but pretend they haven’t, as happens all the time, especially in the Europa and Conference Leagues. I suppose cheating is normalised and second nature in a cheaters’ league. Come to think of it, that’s probably what some people don’t like about internationals, because they are used to the culture of limitless acquisition with ill-gotten gains. Capitalism’s greatest victory is our greatest loss and the Premier League has always gloried in how it warped minds over money to make this an unquestioned reality
In international football, you’ve got what you’ve got and you have to make the best of it. Ironically, the FA has also succumbed to the culture of acquisition and used its wealth to try and buy a winning manager as a substitute for encouraging and creating a culture and way of playing that is sympatico with players and coach. No manager, foreign to the winning country, apart from Otto Rehhagel (a German), has ever won the World Cup or Euros. So no major country. But of course, where would football be without English exceptionalism which thinks such precedents won’t apply to them? The FA think these realities are for the poor people and it’s why we are the only major football nation not to win anything in the last 60 years.
The English managerial options are apparently so thin on the ground and uninspiring that to get anyone good they think they have to use their money. But that is, of course, exactly why the English options are thin on the ground and uninspiring. If England had to face their own inadequacy of coaching, perhaps attitudes would change and the DNA of the nation’s football would also be altered. But no, they just fail at trying to buy their way out of failure.
Everyone knows where the strengths and weaknesses lie. If they don’t they haven’t been watching England for the 60 long years that I have. For almost the whole of that time, being unable to hold the ball in midfield and control play, ceding possession, sitting ever deeper until the defence crumbles, is a story all of us have grown up with. Symbolised by that ‘more energy’ gesture Glenn Hoddle used to make, as if a lack of energy was the problem or could be the solution.
I wasn’t the only one who hoped that Thomas Tuchel could inculcate a different mentality but this goes too deep and he clearly can’t. So what to do?
I maintain that international football is nation against nation and that is players and managers. A major nation should be able to bring through adequate coaches and indeed every other one does. The fact that it’s thought we can’t is just tough. You can’t buy a German to play in goal, nor should you be able to buy a German manager. It’s cheating and not what international football is meant to be about.
Anthony Gordon’s a smart lad, as well as a great player; his perceptive, intelligent and self-aware interview this week was revealing when he said: “As a nation we don’t have that strength (possession) like the Spanish, where we control games like they do. It’s not in us.”
He’s identifying what we’ve all known for so long. The alternative way is not to even try. Gordon says an option would be to “really play to our strengths, which is play physical, play direct football and on the counterattack”.
Playing to those strengths might give us a chance but probably wouldn’t if we insist on giving the ball away, despite having a gifted front six. And what can anyone do when the panic sets in – and it always sets into every generation?
I do like Tuchel and his Germanic gangly camp ways but I’ve thought since the start that he’d be surprised by England’s capability to repeatedly give the ball away, their lack of thought and sophistication under pressure, and it was proved to be true against Argentina and against Spain on Saturday. In both when they needed calm, rational intelligence, they ceded possession easily and invited the opposition back into the game.
I’d like to think the top-flight football agent who told me 10 years ago that England players are “too thick to win. Nice enough, good lads, but without the intellectual capacity to think on the hoof” is no longer true. We have improved. The story he told me about the French players going to a Monet exhibition being misunderstood by a famous English player for going to a “money” exhibition (“why are you going to see some money?”) can’t still be true either, can it?
Gareth Southgate knew of the English mentality implicitly when under pressure, having grown up in and around it. How it covers up fear and panic with physicality and thoughtless defensiveness. Tuchel can’t know it in the same way. It’s like when you hear an Australian accent, of which there are many. Australians implicitly understand which strata of society it originates from but we haven’t the first idea, the way we would if it was England. Similarly a German can’t understand the English psyche the way someone perceptive from England intrinsically can. So the headless panic must have shocked him and by then, because from the start of his tenure he wasn’t ever able to completely grasp and understand it, he isn’t able to counteract it, if that was even possible. It’s like trying to talk a left-handed person into being right-handed.
And so as we head into another already less successful qualifying campaign, is there any sign of it changing? Not really. Maybe we are getting better but it’s the hope that kills you. We can beat most countries, just not the very good ones. It’s mostly not a football thing, just a psychological problem inculcated since childhood. The elite manager idea hasn’t worked yet; the using money thing hasn’t either. I don’t think England’s problems have ever really been to do with managers, nor always lack of football skills. It’s between their ears. Gareth knew that and understood it. I’m not sure Thomas will ever be able to do anything about it or even fully understand it.
What are we going to do? Perpetuate the problem, keep spending and keep dreaming? Of course we are.
