Tragic Football Stories - Let us Kick Around the misshapen Jabulani that is English football right here

oh wait

good to get a disastrous English manager out of the way before some Polack comes over here, takes our jobs, and wins the 2018 World Cup in England.

either that or, come the end of 2014: arise, Sir Paul Gascoigne.

They're going to raise him from the dead?

... sorry

tough but fair.

xp deeply unpleasant person imo

how about ray wilkins? he's worked with scolari, hiddink and ancelotti... just a thought.

Psycho for the job

^^^ Consider the source

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/8991881.stm

Glenn Hoddle on some Harry Potter 'pure blood' shit right there.

I've been thinking - if we did a poll on Arteta-situtation players, what would the options be?

1) I think players should only be allowed to play for their 'primary nationality', and only have a choice if that's genuinely ambiguous (as for, say, Michael Owen/ Marcel Desailly) - "footballing considerations" shouldn't come into it.
2) Players with a strong, but secondary nationality from a parent are fine (e.g. Owen Hargreaves), but players with no family connection aren't.
3) Cacau/Arteta/Almunia etc are fine with me - if a nation gives them citizenship, then they should be allowed to play for it.

I tend to lean towards 2 I think. But as far as managers are concerned I like the medieval Italian city-state idea where you bring in a foreigner cos they're above the internecine squabbling.

(Possibly a truly cosmopolitan option 4 needed too - uncapped players should be able to play for any country they wish to, regardless of citizenship - no problems with John Barnes/Tony Cascarino etc)

The 'rejects' team that should be allowed in every world cup would solve these problems

Or England, to give them their full title.

BOOM

3) Cacau/Arteta/Almunia etc are fine with me - if a nation gives them citizenship, then they should be allowed to play for it.

The only problem I see with this is it isn't fair. Deco can go to Portugal before the age of 18, get a Portuguese passport in 2 years and be eligible. We cannot get a player from outside the EU to play here until he has played 50% of his national teams games in the past two years or got a special talent visa (i.e. the utd twins, lucas and denilson for their success for the brazilian national u19 or u17 teams) AND then wait five years for them to be eligible for citizenship...

if we could get every uncapped foreigner in the premiership to potentially play for england after two years, we'd only have about 5 englishers left in the team :)

you'd risk a big talent drain away from some nations too i expect

two is the option here i think

Mainz star Holtby chooses Germany over England
http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=827179&sec=euro2012&cc=5901

Since the 2005-6 season Bent has scored 78 Premier League goals. Frank Lampard has 67 in the same period, Jermain Defoe 59, Steven Gerrard 56, Peter Crouch 41, and Carlton Cole and Emile Heskey between them – as a kind of raging twin-headed in-the-mixer monster – have 51. Only Wayne Rooney is ahead of Bent, with 82

cant play with rooney blah blah blah

Tonight on BBC2 at 9:30, crisp fans.

England has the strongest, most watched, most successful league in football. Yet none of the superstars who grace the Premier League were even born the last time the English national team won a major trophy. Can England win the next World Cup? England goal-scoring legend and Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker goes in search of answers to this 44-year-old question, gathering the views of some of football's biggest names, including Jose Mourinho, Jurgen Klinsmann, Carlo Ancelotti, Harry Redknapp and Johan Cruyff.

Also contributing their views are the FA's Director of Football Development Sir Trevor Brooking, former England coach Terry Venables and Premier League Chief Executive Richard Scudamore.

And Lineker looks at how the Spanish have transformed the fortunes of their national team, how the Germans have reinvented themselves and asks if English football needs to change now, and if we really can have the best league and best team in the world at the same time.

That's a decent set of guests. I could answer their question myself though.

England has the strongest, most watched, most successful league in football.

V. debatable, okay, what does that mean?

Would like to see a joint Geoff Hurst and John Terry interview. Or maybe Gary could ask himself why he didn't win the World Cup in 1990, 1986, etc.

Also amused by this chart from Wikipedia of who's the biggest underperforming country in the European championship tournaments:

http://imgur.com/juzhH.png

On a par with mighty footballing greats Sweden and Turkey.

I think England & Sweden have pretty much identical world cup records too, except England didn't have to play Brazil in their final

Bit iffy treating only Serbia as Yugoslavia?

harsh on Ukraine too. Slovakia gets full credit though

England's European Championship record is a far bigger indictment of the national team than the World Cup shenanigans.

My bad - Sweden have reached the semis four times, England twice

Kazakhstan reaching the group stage would f*ck up those maps nicely.

btw, i heard that Kazakhstan plays their matches on artificial turf, so i guess that makes it about time for Greenland to enter the competition.

http://www.boerenkoolenradijs.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/sepp_blatter.jpe

In the concacaf tournament surely? Would be a genuinely awesome away trip either way.

don't think they've decided yet. CONCACAF is obviously a much smarter idea, snatch up some vaguely Eskimo related Danish footballers and get going :) (Jesper Gronkjaer is a Greenlander)

Don't know that we've touched upon this anywhere, there are a lot of implications if this lassie wins.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11452434

I was quite surprised looking at this lot. Makes Sven look like a big success.

Knock-out games won in 90 minutes in WC finals by England since 1966:
1970: none
1974: DNQ
1978: DNQ
1982: none (round robin 2nd round with two 0-0 draws)
1986: 1 (3-0 win vs Paraguay)
1990: none (2 wins aet vs Belgium and Cameroon)
1994: DNQ
1998: none
2002: 1 (3-0 win vs Denmark)
2006: 1 (1-0 win vs Ecuador)
2010: none

Knock-out games won in 90 minutes in WC or EC finals by Spain, 1966-2006:

1986: 1 (5-1 win vs Denmark)
1994: 1 (3-0 win vs Switzerland)

Anybody watch it? I forgot.

On iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v8sj8/Inside_Sport_Can_England_Win_the_Next_World_Cup/

I recorded it, will watch tonight. I'd like it if Mourinho, Ancelotti and Cruyff all said that all that's needed is for the players to show more passion, under an English coach.

! that would be genuine 100% classic

Arsenal's Jack Wilshere has been named in both the under-21 and senior squads.

good to see they learnt from spreading theo too thin

ok the start of this show is hilar

already got "dedicated" and "passionate" on my bingo card 2 minutes in. redknapp thought we had better players than anyone. the music sounds like someone's funeral on eastenders. and the footage of the panel watching the game seeing how bad they are v. germany is terrific.

lol at lineker admitting cryuff saw him as the problem at barca and decided to work at youth development and ship him off.

Perhaps worth noting quite how far Kevin Davies has come. He's clearly no-one's long-term solution, but the fact this article was a fairly plausible epitaph for his career in 2003... props for that, y'know?

They are talking about Barca as Spain and yet complaining none of the top clubs in England play enough English players. So great, 8 players of the Spain side play for Barca - but what if they fail? Who is there is to compete with them? What about the rest of Spanish football? You can complain about high priced foreigners in the Premiership but ignore Ronaldo and Kaka and Ozil and Fabiano because Barca only buy a Zlatan or Henry or Alves 1 per season?

Lineker talks about how great it is Real spent so much on their youth academy but neglects to mention that they had to sell off their training ground to the government and have to pay rent on it.

Mourinho saying the problem is the big 4 don't play with English strikers like the Spanish do. Like Messi, Higuain, Forlan and Aguero, Fabiano and Kanoute, Rossi and Altidore...

Jose now saying he feels he has to buy Spanish players - such as the 1/5 he bought this summer (that 1 has only played 2 games, both as a sub, back up to new signing the Argentine Angel di Maria).