Beyond the gloom, faraway hills may genuinely be green
It’s already started.
Barely 24 hours had passed before England’s latest qualification for a major tournament was sullied, this time by Roy Hodgson’s leaked space monkey remark in what should have been the sanctity of the home dressing room as they addressed how to overcome the Poles at Wembley and book their berths in Brazil.
We’ll not play judge and juror on that one here. Suffice to say it was an ill-advised remark to make, but it was difficult not to find common ground with Stan Collymore, Wayne Rooney and Andros Townsend who all dismissed the storm-in-a-teacup ‘story’ yesterday with an air of disbelief and not a little derision besides.
Of more interest in the wake of that 2-0 win were the remarks made by Hodgson and Rooney, the former claiming that other sides would dread to be drawn against his boys and the latter speaking about his determination to finally produce an array of performances to match those he gave for England back in Euro 2004.
Neither man was making cocksure noises about a first World Cup win in almost 50 years — far from it — and yet their comments were framed in a sort of gung-ho manner that will undoubtedly add to the derision should history repeat itself and England suffer the mediocrity of returns banked in recent times.
After all, not even Greg Dyke expects an Englishman to emulate Booby Moore by lifting the World Cup trophy in Rio. The FA chairman’s sights have been set further down the track: to Euro 2020 where he wants to see an England side in the last four and the World Cup two years later when he expects outright victory.
Dyke made public those very projections early last month and one of Paul Gascoigne’s more memorable utterances sprang to mind as the former BBC head man was, in turn, laughed at and ridiculed by a nation accustomed to the Three Lions failing to roar. “I never predict anything,” said Gazza one time, “and I never will.”
It’s easy to join the chorus of clowns, to sit back and consume the car crash TV that all-too-often comes with our neighbours’ difficulties on the field of play but the negativity towards their senior representative football team is an affliction from which we too suffer and must learn to discard.
Aiden McGeady spoke this week about the poisoned chalice that is the job of managing Ireland or England and yet everything about the stories of our most successful of continental neighbours in recent years starts with that same script: of sides in the doldrums and hemmed in by doubt.
Defeat to England in Charleroi 13 years ago was one of the instigators of a change in culture and structure that has seen Germany rebound from an historic low to the brink of renewed global success while Belgium have clearly done something right to be regarded as another of the favourites 10 years after their last tournament.
Then there’s France and Spain. Between them, these two have dominated world football since 1998 yet France went 12 years without World Cup football before that famous defeat of Ronaldo’s Brazil while Spain’s ability to belie their individual talents with collective collapses was once at a level even greater than England’s.
Dyke has identified a lessening in the flood of foreign talent to the shores of the Premier League as the means by which the tide can be turned and yet England have flattered to deceive on the international stage since Moore and Pele were captured in an iconic pose, swapping shirts in Guadalajara, back in 1970.
Sixteen more years passed before England reached such heights again, when they were undone by another South American genius in Mexico, but 17 had already gone by since their unofficial status as the world’s chief exponents of the beautiful game was exposed by the Mighty Magyars at Wembley.
Right-back for England that day against Hungary was one Alf Ramsey whose side claimed the Jules Rimet on that very same spot in 1966: proof that the job of England — or Ireland — manager need not be the diseased vessel McGeady claims it to be, regardless of how bleak the landscape may look.
Email: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie
Twitter: @Rackob
