what they say, these pundits. They say it with their eyes.
Micah ‘The Leap’ Richards is the most encouraging thing about England but I was not seduced into watching the game because I still feel a bit despondent about international football. I think this is because of the following:
1. Steve McClaren. I believe him to be a bit of an appeaser – ‘You want Beckham back? Have Beckham back.’ He seems to make reactionary decisions and as much as we might think we can manage England, we can’t and shouldn’t be allowed to. ‘Don’t listen to me,’ I feel like saying, ‘I’m whimsical, capricious, vindictive and jealous. I make stupid decisions.’ If it was up to me I’d put chimps in the team, and ballroom dancers. It’d be ridiculous, but fortunately I have no power.
2. The team is going backwards through time with McClaren like an autistic archaeologist digging up veterans and former heroes who can only sully their good names. David James? Sol Campbell? Why not reinstate Bobby Charlton and get him to play a quick half. In fact get the entire pub team of legends from that beer advert and give them a go.
3. Sometimes I get depressed but it passes and I only think it’s really bad when I think, ‘What would make me happy?’ and I can’t think of anything. That’s how England make me feel now. What would make it work? David Bentley? Aaron Lennon? Robert Green? There was a time when we’d clamour, that’s right clamour, to have someone in the team: ‘Pick Rooney’ – ‘But he’s only 12’ – ‘PICK HIM’. Or, ‘Take Gazza’ – ‘He’s drunk’ – ‘TAKE HIM’. Now at the first sign of a clamour we’re obeyed, it takes all the fun out of the clamouring. Having said that, PICK ROBERT GREEN.
Those are my three reasons. I dare say once the games become competitive I may feel a tingle but Premier League football hoovers up loyalty like a junkie anteater so it’ll never again be as painful as Italia 90 or Euro 96 or that kick in the nuts last summer. I shall enjoy international football perched like a connoisseur on a barstool of snooty indifference. And you can take that pledge right down to the ol’ pledge bank.
4 Dark lore of Dyer and the Hammers’ hex
I suppose, were I able to trade in some cosmic stock exchange, I would relinquish West Ham’s passage into the third round of the League Cup in order to preserve Kieron Dyer’s lower right leg. As Alan Curbishley said after the win against Bristol Rovers: ‘Now the result seems immaterial.’
It’s difficult to celebrate victory having seen Dyer suffer one of those wince-inducing injuries where the leg visibly contorts within the sock and it seems impossible to imagine it ever healing. It will, of course, in time, six months or so, but that’s the bulk of the season without him and he looked sharp and fast against Wigan last Saturday.
I feel dead sorry for him, in a hospital somewhere hurting. Obviously I don’t know what it’s like to be a professional athlete but it must engender a particular insecurity to be dependent on your body in such a palpably direct manner. Whenever I suffer great physical pain or even mild discomfort it immediately resets my psychology to neutral. Say if I feel all sad and self-indulgent then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more – ‘Damn you tiny assassin, all clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial.’
‘What?! Arsenal away in the fourth round? Damn you, Lucifer. Why have you forsaken me, Lord?’
It’s terrible news for West Ham, and Curbishley implied there might be a jinx as so many of the players he’s bought in have suffered injury. It is bloody unfortunate, but a curse? After last season’s controversy plenty have grudges, not least in the city of steel. Could former Blades boss Neil Warnock be poised in a circle of stone, stinking of chicken’s blood, spewing white-eyed incantations and clutching a buckled dolly of Julien Faubert?
There appears to be a troubling tendency among under-pressure Premiership managers to jab accusatory digits in the direction of the dark arts – Martin Jol cited ‘black magic’ as the reason Spurs didn’t get a penalty at Old Trafford at the weekend. Perhaps Tottenham did deserve something from a tie in which United were less than brilliant and they doubtless had chances but the resulting home win surely owes more to Nani’s right foot and Wes Brown’s chest/upper arm than Aleister Crowley’s necromancy.
Perhaps this is a further indication that top-flight managers are under too much pressure, when in our secular age they crumble into medieval beliefs whenever luck goes against them – ‘What?! Arsenal away in the fourth round? Damn you, Lucifer. Why have you forsaken me, Lord?’ However, the injury crisis at Upton Park, if not the work of Beelzebub, is critical: Dean Ashton, Scott Parker, Dyer, Faubert, Freddie Ljungberg and both Lucas Neill and Matthew Upson joined the afflicted minutes after they signed. The only solution available to the club is to keep signing more players, an approach I believe was pioneered by Stalin in his gruelling fixture against Hitler on the Eastern Front.
His mentality was, as I understand, ‘Right, loads of Germans are dying, loads of Russians are dying and we’re both going to continue to pour young men into this battle until it’s resolved, but as Russia has a larger stack of human chips we can carry on playing beyond the point of German exhaustion. I feel the hand of history, not on my shoulder but cheekily goosing me out of respect.’
Let’s hurl more millionaire footballers onto this bonfire of the lame; why wait till they arrive at West Ham? Just give Eidur Gudjohnsen a sack of money then smash him in the balls with a pool cue. Let’s buy a wing at Whitechapel hospital and send an army of thugs with chequebooks and chainsaws on a tour round Europe to assemble a hobbling chorus of convalescents. I wish Dyer a speedy recovery. It’s a shame, and as an offer of appeasement to the angry football gods I shall sacrifice the next virgin I meet on Green Street. It could take a while.
5 Never mind Israel, I’ve been beaten by Bohemia
I am writing this at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where Arthur Miller wrote A View from the Bridge, where Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen and where Leonard Cohen received ‘head on an unmade bed’ from Janis Joplin. As is the case with most hotels trading on history, it’s a bloody dump.
When I phoned reception in the dead of night to ask for water, water, I was told: ‘There’s a deli across the street.’ In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs water is right there with shelter and excretion at the pyramid’s foundation; they may as well dispense with the toilet and the building; they could just have a bellhop stood in the street charging you $200 a night for crapping in the gutter and snuggling up with Oscar the Grouch. Comprised neatly in this scenario is the perennial issue of the romantic versus the pragmatic – you don’t stay at the Chelsea for room service, you stay because you’re renting a little counter-cultural history for the night.
‘Rio said not qualifying is “unthinkable” but that just sounds like Chris Eubank describing the Titanic’
Today England face Israel at fortress Wembley, God help us. A draw against Brazil, defeat against Germany – it’s not exactly impenetrable. Steven Gerrard has his own romance v pragmatism choice to make – does he play with a fractured toe, knowing his significance and skill are vital to Blighty, or does he heed the advice of his club and convalesce?
It seems that Stevie will play, which worries me for a couple of reasons. I hope no one treads on his foot in the game of football he is playing against Israel’s national football team on a football pitch. Also it is difficult not to be concerned about the state of our squad when sickbeds have to be trundled to stadiums like wheelbarrows and tipped on to the field so we can scrabble together 11 men.
In addition to Steve McClaren’s grave-robbing selection policy – this week Emile Heskey, next week Dixie Dean – it leaves me thinking that not qualifying is a realistic possibility. Romantically,