Alex In Wonderland

It's Coming Home, It's Coming Home, Football's...

Only it's not.

You there, American reader with your notion of soccer (it's football you know. Played with the feet? No? I give up!) being a quaint game that the entire rest of the world plays - this may mean nothing to you but read on anyway.

Three Lions! En-ger-land! Ranked 6th (I believe) in the world, most populated of the Home Nations, winner of a World Cup, possesser of £193 million worth of talent in their squad versus Northern Ireland, 116th in the world (with the likes of St Lucia) and population probably equal in total to our 5th largest city! Easy victory on the road to qualifying to the world cup. A staggering repeat of the 4 - 0 win we enjoyed over them. Job done!

Only it wasn't.

We failed to come up with a single goal. The Northern Irish did. They scored one 10 minutes from time (coincidentally the time that I turned off the TV). Admittedly the Northern Irish defence played out of its skin to frustrate us but hats off to them. They had the passion and commitment and belief we so obviously lacked. They are managed by someone who has never stopped trying and instills confidence in his players.

I despair. Football is our national game, we had a good team, we have undoubted talent there in most positions, we can give anyone a good game on our day, but we are managed by a man who bought the Scudetto in Italy with Lazio and that seems unable to adapt his thinking and tactics to a game where, and let's be honest about this, you need to be tactically astute. Sven is not a passionate man (he bonks like one according to the headlines about all his alleged affairs) but seems disinterested in the game as a whole.

I am not going to say we need an englishman as manager because I think that is old fashioned talk and total nonsense. I do think we need someone who believes in what they are doing and has passion and drive and can communicate this to the players. Sven cannot do this. He is flat in his communication with the press and you wonder how he translates this across to the players.

Like many people I want to be proud of my team and see us winning, but I want some passion about it too.

Posted by AlexC at September 8, 2005 03:02 PM