Cry God for Harry, England, and
Saint George.
Harry Redknapp, that
is, the only member of the football community so far to have had the temerity
to risk a little snipe at the England football squad who put in the worst
performance at a World Cup since Harry himself first pulled on the claret and
blue of West Ham.
Lacking passion,
said Harry on Radio Five Live.
Mostly, though, the TV pundits have
closed ranks around our boys in Brazil, telling us not to blame Roy Hodgson, who
has the respect of his players and picked the squad the public demanded, and
not to blame the players, who did their best and put in some promising
performances.
So whom do we blame? Myleene
Klass?
Benedict Cumberbatch? P
Diddy?
Normally, the F.A. serves us
up a ready-made scapegoat; a foreign manager who doesn't understand the English
way, the referee who sends off our star player, the unsatisfactory hotel
arrangements.
But this time,
we were told, everything was perfectly in place.
I lost count of the number of players who said this was the
best-prepared England squad they had ever joined.
Even after our ho-hum performance
against a Costa Rica side who had already qualified for the next stage and
looked like they were trying to keep their kit clean, Roy was going on about how
we were probably the best-prepared team at the tournament.
That's rather like being in charge of
the best turned-out horse.
As
anyone who has ever seen a tenner go West on a beautiful shiny animal that looked
terrific in the parade ring will tell you, Roy, it's about results.
My view is that England's sports
psychiatrists, small army of masseurs and physiotherapists, humidity experts, nutritionists,
F.A. ambassadors and commercial staff (there, presumably, to ensure as few
adverts as possible go out without the presence of Joe Hart), packing into
Rio's lovely Royal Tulip hotel may have contributed to our abject failure.
When your backroom staff comes
close to outnumbering the population of some of the nations taking part, it could
plant the thought in the players' heads that the powers that be don't really
believe in you.
That seed of doubt
can be deadly.
I've never played football at the
highest level, but I did fight a brave battle for life (not really, I just lay
in bed whinging, waiting to die) after surgical excision of a large abdominal
tumour, a right hemicolectomy, an ileostomy, bilateral pulmonary emboli (oh, and
a touch of athlete's foot), and I know that whenever I saw four consultants
clustered round my bed holding clipboards and smiling encouragingly, I thought
the game was up.
If, on the other
hand, the morning brought nothing but a demotivated healthcare worker slinging
two pieces of soggy toast at me and telling me to get on with it, I was cheered
by the thought I was being trusted to live.
When you see forwards from smaller
footballing nations like Nigeria and Switzerland, bit-part players in the
Premier League, effortlessly converting when one-on-one with the goalie, which
we were manifestly unable to do, you begin to see the problem.
Sorry, by the way, for being such a
sourpuss this week (it was the great philosopher Sir Elton John, you may
recall, who said sorry seemed to be the hardest word.
But then he wasn't at any of England's post-match press
conferences where they said little else), but a pen burst in my pocket.
I don't know, first I get
dangerously ill, then England get knocked out, and now the pen.
I picked the pen up at the BBC in
Leeds.
Regional BBC has bought a
consignment of hideously cheap ballpoints, the kind that live in polythene
packs of 20 on the very bottom shelf of a discount shop.
They don't write exactly, but scratch
irritatingly at the paper.
I
absent-mindedly put one in my pocket, and for once it gave up its ink, all of
it in a gusher, all over my money, cards, and inside the deepest recesses of my
fingernails when I put my hand in my pocket to retrieve the wretched
thing.
I know that strictly speaking the
pen is licence-payers' property, but I checked on the internet and a box of 50
of these pens costs £1.50.
With
the BBC's buying power, and its bulk order discount, I reckon it must have set
the licence paying community back little more than a penny to ruin my trousers.
Why couldn't we have the Zebra
Z-grip retractable, 12 for six quid on Amazon, and the BBC could probably get
them for half that?
"Good
quality pen," said Natalie, one of two reviewers of the item (I sometimes
think my spare time is ill-spent until I see people reviewing ballpoint pens on
Amazon), while Robert Kyle, the other, trills, "Easy to use, good
grip."
Around half a quid a
pen, and two 5-star reviews.
I've
been to see West End shows on less recommendation than that.
But it's good to know money's being
saved, otherwise the Corporation could never have afforded to send the chap
reading the weekend's sports news on BBC Breakfast to Rio, from where he linked
to footage of the England cricket team at Headingley, and the rugby union team
in New Zealand.
In fairness, though, there were yet
more clips of Roy Hodgson looking crestfallen, the significance of which we
clearly would never have gathered had the chap been somewhere in Salford, say,
writing it all down with a cheap pen.