Back to the Classroom for Lessons Not Learnt

In just a few hours the game which will have a huge bearing on the future of football in this country kicks off. As usual, there are unlikely permutations which would allow England to progress with a draw, but basically, England need to win to get through to the last sixteen, and they need to win well to really get this world cup campaign back on track. Even a good win will not alter the feeling that 2010 is not going to be England’s year and, yet again, will stumble out limply within a couple of knock out rounds – at best.

As usual also, there will be the post mortems, the finding of a scape-goat to hang the nation’s angst onto and some more mindless optimism just before England embark on the Euro 2012 qualifying competition. Most people in football and knowledgeable supporters felt that there were grounds for optimism: we had the right manager and the world cup qualifying rounds went very well, and there had been an impressive win on German soil with an essentially England second XI. From the matches played since England’s only defeat in qualifying and especially the friendlies this year, it’s been downhill ever since.

Now press stories are circulating that irrespective of what happens, Don Fabio will be off, to be replaced by an Englishman, Roy Hodgson. There seems to be a pattern emerging here. Hire an expensive foreign manager, don’t give him the infrastructure and support to do his job properly, sack him amidst murmurings of disquiet over foreign managers, meanwhile continue to pay lip service to developing the game at lower levels and ignore the parlous state of football’s finances. Get another English manager, spurred on by the ‘little Englander’ media faction, and repeat process as before.

The truth is that millions of inches of column space and TV air time have been devoted to discussing where things go wrong and how to put them right. These have been discussed since England’s 1970 exit from the Mexican world cup. Managers have come and gone. Some were blatantly the wrong choice (Taylor, Keegan, Hoddle). Some were overlooked (Clough), but whatever and whoever the choice, RTG just can’t help coming back to the same conclusion: it’s yer basic raw talent, that’s the problem.

Clearly the ‘Golden Generation’ was totally oversold and optimistically assessed when coming through the ranks. Judging by the number of public relations gaffes that the current squad seem to be making, maybe they’re using the same PR outfit as Tony Hayward, BP’s beleaguered CEO! Let’s face it, most English footballers are pretty thick and even make a virtue of their gauche bling culture. When you see how most foreign players in England are better in English than many of their native counterparts and how English players abroad rarely pick up their local language, you realise how English players have largely ignored their off-field development. Indeed, reading an interview response by Jamie Redknapp, he boasted how his dad would encourage him to bunk off school to go training at Bournemouth.

What has resulted over the last forty years are successive generations of England players who are so singly dimensioned that you can’t really sense that any of them is going to read a game tactically and change things in real time on the field. They’ll just wait until half time and wait for the ‘hair-dyer’ treatment to be told what to do – that’s according to what all pundits say. And perhaps, RTG is finally coming to the nub of the problem. A failing education system in this country which rates the UK as one of the lowest in the developed world, allied to a celebrity culture which extols and promotes worthless people are taking their toll on our poorly educated footballing souls. Basically, England just can’t get clever players who have developed their minds to cope with adversity, to embrace change or to rationalise and deal with the pressures exerted on them by modern British society.

The Keeper

…it’s gone right through his hands

The Keeper has managed to prize himself away from his new HD TV (special offer at Tesco) to bring you his first report since the start of the World Cup. And what a week it’s been. After getting over the shock of seeing a Hyundai car drive on and score England’s first goal, the Keeper has maintained an almost permanent vigil in front of a festival of football – well, three football matches a day anyway and more of a village fete in the end than a festival. But surely the standard can only improve.

At the BBC it’s a case of recession, what recession? The Beeb seem to have upped sticks and headed mob handed over to South Africa for a last choo choo on the old gravy train before the cuts kick in. The Keeper entered into this televisual feast thinking that it was all about football but how wrong you can be. Chris Hollins has shown him that South Africa makes wine; two blokes who he’s never heard of are driving around in a bus to show that there are also exotic wild animals in South Africa and, favourite among favourites, Gabby Logan, reported live from the townships to show us that some poor people live in South Africa too, ‘you know’. What a shame that, when the Keeper wanted to learn something useful about football, all he had was Mick McCarthy, who, with the dourest of manner, sought only to repeat exactly what had just happened in full view on screen in a drab Yorkshire drawl - “Aw naw. Yer see ‘ees just missed t’pass and the chance of a counter by giving t’ball away again.” Yep, I just saw that Mick. Glad the licence fee is working hard for us over there. The Keeper’s viewing experience was also enhanced considerably by the presence of that doyen of football analysis, CBBC at Wayne Rooney’s live press conference when their incisive questioning revealed that, yes, he was missing his first born child.

The Keeper had serious reservations about the BBC’s choice of music to introduce Japan’s opening game against Cameroon – the soundtrack to ‘Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’ which, for those who don’t know it, starred David Bowie as a rebellious PoW in a Japanese camp during the Second World War who dies a horrible death buried up to his neck in sand in the blazing heat of the day. Or, as Mick McCarthy would expertly summarise it: “Fer me ‘ees let isself down by getting ‘imself buried in t’sand up to ‘is neck and ‘ees 'anded the initiative right over t’ Japanese.” Aside from adding a huge oil slick to the fire of opinion that popstars can’t act to save their lives (see also Phil Collins in ‘Buster’, Mick Jagger in ‘Ned Kelly’), the film is a graphic illustration of the enormous cruelty exhibited by Japanese soldiers toward their captives in the appalling conditions of the PoW camps. The Keeper felt it was a rather lazy choice of music given the enlightened mood of friendliness and reconciliation of modern times (or pretend we do eh Major?) and perhaps one that should have been given a bit more thought by the BBC researcher as he sipped a glass of Stellenbosch Shiraz in his Cape Town hotel room.

The Keeper couldn’t get through his first World Cup report without mentioning the signature sound for the tournament, the vuvuzelas. Now, there have been rumblings afoot that certain viewers are not happy with the constant buzzing, resembling a swarm of angry bees, that provides the backing track to all the games. So much so in fact that there was talk of a Fifa ban on taking them into the stadium and the BBC (yes them again) were even prepared to offer a vuvuzela-free broadcast via the red button. The Keeper was astonished at this blatant disregard for the cultural heritage of the host nation. After all, what else is going to drown out the sound of that bloody awful brass band that insists on following England around?

There was more good news for the people of Southern Africa this week when it just happened that Princes Harry and Wills, who are known to love Africa ‘with a passion’, stopped by to do a bit of charity work in the region at the same time as the World Cup just happened to be taking place. What’s more, some ITV geezer just happened to have a couple of spares for the England match in Cape Town, where the Princes just happened to be at this point in their charity tour. Better start looking for a charity in Brazil in four years time, eh chaps?

Lack of Vision Means Same Old England

The England team have departed for South Africa. All the talk of who will make the 23 is over and the serious business of trying to win a World Cup begins. RTG watched the thrilling spectacle of a bunch of wealthy young sportsmen boarding a Virgin Atlantic 747 , live on Sky Sports News, and naturally, we felt a certain degree of excitement that only the World Cup can generate. But underlying the anticipation was a slight sense of regret that England have not really moved on from the huge disappointment that was Germany 2006, just like we hadn’t really moved on from Japan or France before that. Where are we as an international football nation and what have we learned?

In 2006, the team, dubbed the ‘Golden Generation’, departed these shores amidst enormous national expectation. Ultimately, the term ‘Golden Generation’ referred more to the opulence that the players and their publicity seeking WAGS lavished around the town of Baden Baden than it did the quality of their football. It was USA Today, a paper that measures its football coverage in millimetres rather than inches that stood alone in predicting that the ‘overrated’ England team would go out with a whimper. And, famously, as we know, they did.

You can’t really blame a nation like England for having unrealistic expectations of the national side. After all, supporters hear constantly about how our league is the best and richest in the world. The Premier League and Sky are forever slapping themselves on the back in congratulation at what a fine job they are doing and never stop telling us so. Surely, with the kind of sums of money we hear banded around and the celebrity status that some of our players seem to acquire in the eyes of the media, we should be winning more trophies shouldn’t we?

This time, as the team left to do battle in South Africa, there was undoubtedly a more distinct sense of realism about this squad and their chances? There are the inevitable last minute injuries to key players that inevitably reduce the chances of success. That always happens and this year is no exception. But, RTG wonders if maybe the football watching public are feeling, like us, that this is just a case of here-we-go-again.

The first choice team for South Africa bears a striking resemblance to the one that failed last time. They are obviously older and, perhaps to our benefit, more experienced. But it is worrying in the extreme that we don’t seem to have produced any players in the interim to challenge those that turned out in 2006 for places. Even the ‘Wonderkid’ of last time, Theo Walcott, didn’t even make the cut. Yes folks. This is just the ‘Golden Generation’, four years on, minus a few faces – left out mainly due to injury. Capello has been forced to stick with what he knows because there simply doesn’t seem to be anything better out there.

You may not even know it, because the coverage was so sparse, but the England Under 17s recently won their version of the European Championship. The Under 21s got to the last final of theirs. So there are good young players out there, there just aren’t enough of them pushing on to greatness once they make it to the ‘big time’.

When England went lamely out of the competition in 2006, at that point we needed planning, vision and proper footballing objectives from the governing body of our national sport. We needed the kind of strong leadership that could take this recurring problem by the scruff of the neck and deliver us an England team full of players capable of winning a tournament and giving the long-suffering, overpaying English supporter something to be proud of? Four years later and one failure to qualify for Euro 2008, where are we? The FA promise to focus on all the right objectives – that are supposed to be in the interests of football - but have continued to deliver all the wrong ones. Even England’s state-of-the-art new home, the New Wembley Stadium, was built with revenue raising as its main objective, while failing to deliver a playing surface worthy of Sunday League let alone potential world beaters.

The Premier League is increasingly the playground bully in English football. No one at the FA seems willing to stand up to them in the name of football development and, when they do, they seem to disappear without trace. Development of players is very much a random process left to the will of the clubs. If they make it, they make it. If they don’t – well who cares? This situation has allowed promising young English players to be swallowed up by big spending Premier League clubs only to spend many of their formative years languishing on the bench. Meanwhile, the experienced English talent that does feature regularly in the first team seem to arrive at the end of the season either injured or too tired to compete meaningfully in a four week tournament. The so-called ‘richest league in the world’ does not seem to be able to generate enough wealth or expertise to produce talent at grass roots level, merely to pamper and pay fortunes to its overrated stars.

There are some positives. St. George’s Park, once the national football academy at Burton is due for completion in 2012. Exactly what its role is, and what purpose it has, RTG is not sure. We wait to see. We do have a new manager and one that most supporters will feel was the right appointment, even if it took the FA, yet again, to throw huge sums of money at him to come over.

RTG desperately hopes that the Capello factor, and a little bit of luck, spur England on to victory. Of course we do. But there’s a distinct sense that our governing body’s refusal to change and their inability to set, and follow, proper football objectives, rather than corporate ones, means we are once again entering a major tournament having learned nothing from our failings at the last one and having squandered the huge resources that the game generates in this country.

As stated earlier, RTG believes we have the right manager. If it goes wrong again, surely it is time for supporters to start asking more questions of the powers that keep making the same mistakes over and over again with seemingly precious little will or ability to do anything about it.

The Keeper

He’s complaining about the ball already!

The Keeper apologises for his tardy appearance this week and can only blame the mountain of special and not so special world cup pull outs that has blocked his path to his desk. Amidst the mass of information of absolute no need to know facts and figures, very few media pundits were making predictions and of those that were, none were backing England to win. No bad thing since the jingoism of previous world cups has raised expectations that have only served to act as an additional squirt of lemon to the eye in the run of disappointing results. The Keeper notes that the last time the press was so pessimistic, in 1990, we did rather well!

Well the Keeper is going to make a prediction. Yes, the Keeper believes that come July, the words “arise Sir David Beckham” will be proclaimed. The Keeper predicts that under the astute tutelage and inspirational presence of himself, the Queen will respond to the will of the People (and the Sun, News of the World, Mirror, Daily Star, Hello magazine etc) to knight our favourite footballer for his outstanding contribution in getting England to the quarter finals, only to go out on penalties. Needless to say, Beckham’s Ingerlund was (sic) undone by cheating foreign bastards playing for Manchester United. The Queen will overlook the inauspicious start to Sir David’s coaching career, as his well publicised advice to “hit the space” to Theo Walcott prior to the final squad trials, was taken by Theo to be an invitation to go onto the deserted private beaches of recession hit five star resorts this summer.

Talking of Theo, the Keeper was truly taken by the humility shown in his acceptance of Don Fabio’s decision to leave him out of the final squad, along with his “will try harder” guarantees for the future. His PR company really did a bang up job issuing their client’s statement within minutes of the news. Well, he was too busy on a golf course with his dad to do it himself. Let’s hope though that Theo, before he hits the beaches, remembers his environmental duties in switching off some or all of his ten plasma TV screens that fill his mansion acquired on becoming a multi-millionaire before even kicking a ball for Arsenal. And no, professional solidarity means the Keeper totally refutes suggestions of too much too young in his career.

Having not much, too young, didn’t affect the greatest ever footballer too badly however - as the picture showing England fans’ most loved foreign footballer proves. Maradona has promised (threatened more like) to run naked through the centre of Buenos Aires if Argentina wins the world cup. Expect a run on magnifying glasses in the capital if they do. Although given his managerial record – in a word, awful – the most naturally gifted squad at the tournament will not make this happen.

The Keeper truly hopes England and their fans have a great world cup! We’re going to need a lot of luck, but with, for the first time ever, temperatures more suited to English players, you never know!

UEFA’s Useless ‘Fair Play’ Rules Bad News for Fans

Last week, UEFA passed unanimously new “financial fair play regulations” that will come into force from the 2012 financial reporting period for all European clubs that wish to maintain a license to compete in European competitions.

At first glance – and it is only a glance, since UEFA will not be publishing details in full until an unspecified date in June – the regulations appear to be laudable. The main proposal is very simple – a club can only spend what it receives in income. Presumably, this was an effort to level the playing field in preventing clubs from “cheating” by stopping wealthy benefactors distorting competition. The main proposal is flexible in that the revenues to expenditures are assessed over three years and allows shortfalls of up to £38 million. Sanctions, as yet not detailed, will be liable to be applied from the 2013/2014 season.

However, according to a Guardian report on 28th May, these shortfalls can be met by club “sugar daddies” and that these subsidies will only gradually reduce until the 2019/2020 season. Again, no details exist about what happens after that period. In addition, the regulations allow Club owners to invest in “infrastructure projects” such as: stadiums; training facilities; and youth development – but only if they appear as equity and not as loans on the club’s balance sheet. Short fall subsidies will also have to be taken as equity and not loans.

RTG applauds the original intention, but as always once politicians and pseudo politicians get involved they mess it up. Yet again, the vested interests of a few have impacted what is essentially a set of compromises by UEFA. All they have really managed to do is to switch the on-field battles firmly into the board room. But by far the worst “compromise” is in allowing the carpet baggers like Glazer/Gillette/Hicks to be able to continue their debt-loading of clubs, enriching themselves at the expense of their clubs’ histories and supporters. Meanwhile, the sugar daddies will be able to continue their game ruinous inflation of transfer fees and salaries for the next two years, with some restrictions in future years.

What UEFA has also totally failed to address is the issue of fairness regarding TV deals, which form a significant part of revenue for major European clubs. How is it that, in Spain, Real Madrid and Barcelona are allowed to negotiate their own TV deals, earning in Real’s case over £100 million last year? Likewise in Italy, while in England the Premier League has a collective shared agreement. How long before a regulation struggling United, Chelsea or Manchester City start to agitate for similar agreements here?

UEFA say that the “fair play” rules will be regulated by a new UEFA body headed up by a former Belgian Prime Minister. They also acknowledge that it will have to put in place strict assessments to prevent financial cheating – over valued sponsorships being singled out as a potential area by UEFA’s own web site pronouncements.

RTG say that if the experienced regulatory bodies governing the world trading markets have allowed Goldman Sachs, Leahman Brothers, Bernie Madoff and a host of others to conduct their financial shenanigans – in some cases over decades, what hope have a non-legally binding set of football administrators in achieving fair play?

No, RTG has thought long and hard over what is good for the game and still believe that unless a formula, whereby supporters are put in the forefront of managing their clubs is devised, without debt and without recourse to wealthy individuals, football will bury itself in its own commercial abyss. There are supporter owned clubs and whilst not all models could be defined as ideal for the good of the game (Real Madrid for a start), better and cleverer minds surely exist to be able to meet the developing and future needs of football – as a sport. Not one that is a compromise on continuing the status quo: carpet baggers, dodgy deals and sugar daddies.

And on a final note, given that most clubs will need to boost their incomes to meet the new regulations, guess who will end up having to pay?

The Keeper

...he Shoots, He Fumbles, He's Scottish!

Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative Bing Crosby sang. Clearly words that struck a chord with newly appointed England captain Rio Ferdinand before his first game in charge last week. And why not? When asked about the Wembley pitch he located the positive where nobody else had managed to do before him. By alluding to the fact that the players had no idea what the pitches would be like in South Africa, he assured the watching public that, should any of them turn out to be less than perfect, playing at Wembley would prove to be the perfect preparation. Any of you out there who thought that it was an appalling error of judgment on the part of the FA not to make the quality of the pitch the overriding objective in a national football stadium can eat your words. It seems it turns out to have been a masterstroke of genius to have produced something akin to playing football on a sheepskin rug on a newly polished floor on the off chance that it replicates the pitches in South Africa. Surely this has to be the 2010 version of Rio’s World Cup Wind Ups.

Still, nevertheless, it was good to see positive vibes coming from the head of the England team. Sadly, the previous incumbent, John Terry’s, reputation was done further harm this week by the news that yet another member of his family had fallen from grace. We’ve had his mum caught shoplifting, his dealing cocaine (again!) and JT himself playing away from home with Wayne Bridge’s girlfriend and asking for brown envelopes stuffed with cash to show people round the Chelsea training ground. The Keeper was not surprised, therefore, when he heard this week that JT’s brother Paul has been caught having an affair with one of his Rushden and Diamonds team mate’s missus. Wherever there is a scandal to be found, the Terry family will be around. The Keeper is just relieved that JT is not England skipper anymore as “lifting the World Cup” might mean something completely different in his world and we might never have seen it again.

The fallout from Lord Triesman’s departure continues with news that Ian Watmore’s departure came also because his plans for reforming the FA were not popular, in particular with the Premier League. When he presented his 20 point plan for reform to Richard Scudamore, he apparently described Richard Scudamore’s reaction to it as if he’d deposited a “bucket of sick” in the room. The Keeper can exclusively reveal that this had nothing to do with Watmore’s plans at all. In fact, the staff had been making far too much use of the freebies offered by FA official sponsors Carlsberg and MacDonalds!

RTG reported last week that Fabio Capello had a post World Cup get-out clause removed prior to Lord Triesman’s resignation. The Keeper has found that these reports were not true. This just illustrates succinctly the shambles that the FA is in. Just two weeks before England’s first game, Capello is still in doubt over his long term future as England coach

Following his Dutch success, ex-England manager Steve McClaren took over this week at the helm of Wolfsburg in the Bundesliga. He has proved himself to be the master of chameleon-like re-invention in adapting himself to suit his environment. He successfully transformed himself from the ‘Wally with the Brolly’ to Dutch ‘total football’ coach, complete with plausible ‘akshent’, to, pictured here at his first press conference, German autocrat in auto town. Congratulations Steve.