watch tHe skies

Well there’s been plenty of speculation so I thought I’d make an announcement. Yes it is true, i’ve applied for the position of England Football Manager. Given my qualifications and commitment to motivating our bunch of overpaid, undercommitted workshy fops in to actually qualifying for the next World Cup. I am firmly of the opinion that we as the inventors of the beautiful game should be able to beat Croatia with a team of only 3 goalkeepers wearing slippers, and so have decided to take it upon myself to lead the nation to glory in 2010.

My application letter is attached. I await their reply.

Dear Football Association.

I like you watched in horror as our 11 overpaid, underperforming chumps embarrassed themselves at Wembley last wednesday. The holy place of football was indeed desecrated by what can only be described as professional muppetry. As the inventors of the sport we should be proud to take apart any team at Wembley, especially Croatia, who only have barely enough population to fill the team bus.

So please accept this email as application for the vacant manager’s position. I have won exactly the same number of trophies as Steve McClaren, with the added bonus that I know my arse from my elbow when it comes to football.

My wage demands are reasonable indeed. You pay my expenses to all games (including the impending trip to Kazakhstan…. how on earth did we draw them?) and agree to jet my WAG and son to all games first class, and my time is yours. My backroom staff requirements are light. I simply require a platoon of Royal Marine Commandos to train the team and remind them why it is an honour to represent your country.

I am confident that this approach will return national pride and honour to the limp-wristed nonces that dare wear the hallowed three lions, and I am sure that this novel, yet traditional approach will put us back on the throne of world football where we belong. It might not be pretty, but we can’t all be Martin Keown.

Much love and kindness to all.

Matt

I read with some interest on the BBC website, that Sven Goran Eriksson is vexed. Yes indeed, he is most upset at the criticism that he is receiving about his tenure as England Manager. It seems that only now, presumably as the alleged £13,000k a day contract is coming to an end, that he is actually coming off cloud nine long enough to notice what reality smells like.

I would imagine that he will find it hard to match the lifestyle that we Englishmen have paid for, wherever he goes next. It is sad to think that he will be remembered only for spanking the Germans, and at a time where Germany really were very poor, so we probably didn’t get value for money.

Still, if someone offered me that sort of money without any need to deliver other than to compete with other senior FA staff on how many secretaries one can bed, I’d probably take it too, so you can’t blame him.

*incidentally I would abstain from the secretary-bedding activity on the basis that I’m a happily married man

Today I was lucky to be invited to watch Arsenal versus Aston Villa at the beautiful Emirates Stadium. The first Premiership game at this venue ended in a disappointing 1-1 draw, considering that Villa spent most of the game playing a somewhat defensive 11-0-0 formation, whilst Arsenal seemed bent on walking the ball in to the net instead of having a go like normal teams.

Moan aside, the stadium is a thing of beauty. The best description I can think of is to say “Carlsberg don’t do Stadiums, but if they did, it would be the Emirates Stadium”. British readers will get that, for the rest of you, you are probably wondering why I care so much about a soccer stadium. Oh well.

What puzzles me greatly is that Arsenal have turned this stadium in on time and to their £300m budget. That budget includes completely relocating a recycling plant and turning Highbury in to executive apartments. And yet only a few miles away, Wembley remains a shell and may not now be ready in time for the cup final this year. That and the spiralling cost of around a billion pounds and it makes you wonder how a project can go so awry…

With a capacity of 60,000 and probably the only stadium with a dog toilet, it is easily the best stadium in the premiership, and I was spoilt further by spending the pre-match warm up in a nicely decorated box, with free beer, salmon and cream cheese bagels and our own attendant seemingly keen to get us all as drunk as possible. Check out the thumbnails for a couple of photos of the ground I sneaked on to my phone in between Kronenburgs, and head over to the Arsenal website if you would like to know more about the ground, and to question my statement about dog toilets… Here’s to a successful new era for the Arse at the new ground… Come on!

I also took the opportunity to visit Highbury (their home for some eighty years), and it was odd to see such a legendary ground boarded up. Still, you cannot let tradition get in the way of progress, and it is nice to know that in the new ground you will get a good view of the game no matter where your seat is.

Been lacking motivation to go to the gym recently? In this ridiculously hot weather I know I have. However I’ve noticed that the kind people over at the excellent site, mindchanginghypnosis have made available a self-hynosis script recording to help you get yourself up and on to the treadmill, whatever the excuse!

Well another World Cup has been and gone, some great goals, some upsets, another England penalty shootout failure as predicted on these very pages!

Star(s) of the tournament for me were the african teams. Both Ghana and the Ivory Coast played with an excited vigour that seems missing from most teams, and I think that in 4 years’ time, with a little more wisdom and experience, these teams will be hard to beat.

It seems almost poetic that the Italian team won in the end, given the massive upheaval to their domestic game from the corruption trial. In the end, I didn’t care that much who won, as long as Portugal didn’t. Perhaps I am biased but their antics to me were unprofessional, and I hope that Ronaldo enjoys a year of taunting that will make Beckham’s annus horriblus look like a trip to a day spa.

And finally, before I put the World Cup to bed, I thought I would point you at an interesting article over at Adam Eason’s blog. I’m reading Adam’s book ‘The secrets of self-hypnosis’ at the moment, and he has posted an article about how the body language of the England team suggested that they were highly unlikely to win the penalty shootout. Well worth a read. I would imagine that many of the tools we talk about on this site would be perfect for preparing for such moments, and given the huge amounts of cash available to the England team, perhaps they might think about using NLP to help us win a penalty shootout for a change!

And so it’s goodbye Sven, hello Steve McClaren. And hopefully goodbye to diamond formations, multiple substitutions, treating the captain’s armband like a hot potato and hello to some national pride being more, or as important as the obscenely fat wages that our so-called heroes earn each week.

Damn it’s hot, 8.45 in the morning in the middle of England and already the fan is on max and i’m sweltering the office. The product of global warming? Probably. Although when they told us about global warming they omitted to tell us that we would get more of every type of weather. And quite often it seems, all in the same day.

It is quite sobering to think that whilst the tabloids will be choc full of British lovelies mostly naked on Brighton beach, the upshot is more and more of the planet is turning in to Mars.

Oh well, a little bit of positivity on a monday morning! At least we don’t have to listen to the England team complaining about the hot weather any more… Come on Germany!

Another world cup. Another media frenzy. And somewhere in the middle, a handful of Englishmen who are trying to do their best to satisfy a country overdosed on St George. It is at this point of the competition that I always silently ask our boys to put me out of my misery; either play like champions or go home, because I can’t handle any more lacklustre scrapings-through.

And then there is the inevitable penalty shoot-out. Because there always is. And this time around, we have a pretty solid defence and an inept forward line depending on an unfit prodigy and Mr Bean’s older brother. A draw is going to happen, and penalties will be upon us once again.

“Mr Jol, sir?”

“Yes Robbie?”

“We can’t do it, we can’t get more points than Arsenal…”

“Why is that?”

“Because we are Spurs, we are rubbish, West Ham are much better than us!”

“Okay, fair point, let’s er, pretend to have food poisoning and get the game postponed…”

“Good idea Mr Jol, sir, and if we do have to play at least we have a good excuse for being cr@p.”

And so it passed, that Spurs did falter at the final hurdle and The Arsenal jumped in to fourth place, taking the final Champions’ League spot.

And so the curtain closed on Highbury after all of those years, finishing off with a big celebration and the great line from that bloke who played Curly Watts “and now we are off to Ashburton Grove, but we are going to drop by in Paris to pick something up on the way”. Sweet.

So there we have it. Steve McClaren has been named England manager. If his England team plays with twice the verve and flair of his Middlesborough team then we will be begging Graham Taylor to come back by Christmas.

Ok to be fair he has managed to get Middlesborough to the UEFA cup final and I genuinely hope that he can take England somewhere, but I was just hoping for someone with a little more savvy. We need someone who has the tactical experience to match our team’s abilities, and there is little I have seen from his club resume to suggest that he can turn our prima donnas in to a coherent, successful national side.

Good luck to him, the English England manager.

So there I was, thoroughly enjoying Chelsea paste a sorry Manchester United, when suddenly Wayne Rooney is tackled and as he flopped to the floor in agony, I knew that our chances of lifting that “cup” (not really a cup now is it? I mean a cup can hold liquid) had been dealt a serious blow.

But hang on a sec, win the world cup? Sure, we have some excellent, nay, great players, but good enough to win the World Cup? We are hanging our hopes on one person here, which doesn’t say much about the team, does it? No we may have the players that could win the World Cup, but I have yet to see them play as a team to the levels that we can expect to see from Brazil, Italy and France.

We aren’t the only nation to lose our great players before a major competition, but we will be the only ones blaming misfortune for it. You make your own luck and although losing Rooney is a blow, it surely can’t be the reason for failure.

Oh and I hear that following Scolari’s change of heart, that Steve McClaren is now top of the list to succeed Sven “Shagger” Ericksson. Well if McClaren is top of the list then I can’t be far behind him, because I’ve also won bugger all as a manager. Still, at least he is actually English.