We won didn't we?

We won! Though according to Mark Lawrenson the result was only down to England being slightly less good at losing than Sweden. Ninety minutes of listening to Mark is as depressing as being water boarded in Abu Grabe. If racism needs to be booted out of football then surely Mark, by denigrating every action of the whole human race to the point that a permanent vegetative state would seem like a blessed relief, deservers to be expelled by a well primed cannon over the hoop of Wembley Stadium. If it had ever entered my mind to be excited by the many glorious things one can do with a football I imagine I would feel humiliated. Mark along with the other ex-players in the studio appear to view the meagre efforts of my TV screen’s little running-about-ers as Christ would say, “Forgive them Father for they no not what they do.” I on the other hand am constantly amazed at their feats of athleticism and artistry compared with my personal benchmark of running about in painful boots round a muddy field to no avail. There are three sorts of people one should never ask the opinions of; ex players, pundits and non players. It’s true for any discipline with the possible exception of politics. Ex politicians, free of their previous two-faced hypocritical manoeuvring context, often begin to talk sense again. Ex players compare you with the glorious perfection of their own game, forgetting they only achieved it 0.001% of the time, pundits are like ex players but who’ve never actually played, and non-players compare you with any old bollocks their fatuous mind happens to be filled with. It’s not for nothing that it was 1966 that we last won the world cup 4-2 from West Germany, (thank you Wikipedia) forty years on from John Logie Beard’s invention of television. (I know, it’s a joke) Forty years in which to inculcate in the British public the tenets of punditry where opinion is more important than actually doing anything. There is a discrete line between the slander and rapture of the Brazilian public’s response to their team’s efforts and our own. We expect the perfection of the ex players, we overlook the inconvenient reality that punditry never addresses and most of us apply any old bollocks as we aren’t either of the other two. This has had a bad effect on our little running-about-ers who’re actually, lest we forget, simply trying to kick a ball about and win games. We are 100% behind our players- with a knife. We must learn it isn’t helpful to cheer on our lads by shouting, “Come on you lazy good for nothing overpaid ignorant racist pansies, we’ll snap your metatarsals if you don’t win every game 4-2 like you did when we actually supported you properly.”