Has our standing in world sport ever been lower? No team in the rugby world cup semis. Failure to get out of the group stage for English rugby and cricket on the world stage. The repeated failure of our EPL clubs in Europe. Murray having a bit of a mediocre run.
McIlroy and Rose have held their own in golf standings I guess. And we won the Ashes. England football doing what they always do… great in qualifying… heading towards ignominy in France.
Any hope on the horizon?
Bit unfair on Andy Murray that, given he’s our first genuinely world class male tennis player since the 30s, and that GB are in the Davis Cup Final.
We’re better at cycling than we’ve ever been, and strong in athletics. Motor racing (if that counts as a sport). But the major team games are in a sorry state indeed. England and Ireland’s performances in the RWC were pretty lamentable in particular.
Motor Racing – the UK is the technological home of the sport too. The majority of the grid (notable exceptions being Ferrari, Torro Rosso and Sauber) being located (mostly) in Oxfordshire/Northamptonshire
Britain does amazingly well at sport given the size of it.
Don’t like it myself, but an amazingly successful Premier League.
(If you want a successful England team….drop Rooney).
Soon to be World Motor Racing Champion.
Holder of the Tour de France.
Holders of the Ashes.
Holders of the Ryder Cup.
Male tennis player (unlike the U.S.) in the top four in the world.
And compare the amount of medals won in the Olympics compared to other countries with far higher populations.
Holders of The Ashes?!
Reminds me of that line about The Boat Race “Oh, it’s Oxford and Cambridge in the final again”…
If you want a successful England team…drop the all-time leading scorer, who has just skippered England to their most successful Euro qualifying campaign.
I spluttered in my coffee when I read that first line- are you referring to the size of the land mass?
Darts and Snooker.
Well, if a game is played in a Pub, then the Brits will surely excel.
What is needed is a World Championship Cribbage, World Championship Sitting In The Corner Moaning, and a World Championship Who Can Wee The Highest
England Women’s football team had a terrific World Cup in Canada earlier this year. We’ve still got good athletes as shown in the World Champs. Cycling and rowing we’re still extremely strong in.
Sorry! Just seen the mentions of Athletics and cycling in the OP.
3 teams in the Euros!
Domestic Football great – Aston Villa in bottom three and Sherwood maintains the Villa fans will besieging his name in 3 weeks – yes they will with OUT added to it.
What a clown.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Villa were already sounding out Brendan Rodgers.
David Moyes is their preferred option according to the tabloids, apparently…..
Poor David Moyes. In less than a year he’s gone from Sralex’s chosen one to shepherding what was a solid, mid-table Liga club down into the relegation zone. This evening, after yet another dull loss at home, he refused to admit that there’s anything wrong or that his job might be under threat. Six points from eight matches is just a bit of “bad luck”, he claims.
But surely “bad starts to the season” are Moyes’s thing.
Well, nadir for French rugby certainly. Brilliant though the All Blacks were, the 2nd half was like a like a training exercise for them and the French team should be ashamed of themselves. Both the Welsh and Scottish teams can be proud of themselves & did well and the Irish were outplayed.
Cricket, the potential is much better than it was at the start of the year, but let’s see what happens in South Africa first.
England football team; will be knocked out by the first decent team they play in the Euros. Hammering the likes of Lithuania and San Marino is meaningless. I don’t know much about the Premiership these days, but certainly the quality in the Championship is just shocking.
You’re right, but you can only beat what’s in front of you, so from that perspective Roy has done a good job.
The problem with the England side is that we simply don’t have a very large pool of good players. This is probably due to the huge numbers of overseas players in the top division.
As recently as the mid 90s, you had Wright, Fowler, Cole, Collymore, Sheringham and Shearer competing for two striking berths. British Record signing Chris Sutton couldn’t get a look in.
Same with the defence. Bruce & Pallister were at the heart of a dominant Man Utd side, but Pallister was picked sparingly and Bruce not at all.
These days, if you’re English and in the top half of the prem, you’re almost guaranteed a cap.
We always seem to lay the blame for our international failures at the feet of individuals, often our best players like Cole, Gerrard and now Rooney. But the malaise is bigger than any one player.
We under-performed even when we did have a relatively large pool of good players. They’re much-maligned now, but the “golden generation” of English footballers were fairly high on individual quality (Gerrard, Lampard, Cole, Ferdinand, Beckham, Scholes, Rooney, etc), but just couldn’t seem to gel as an effective unit.
I think the problem with the national team is half a dozen things, rather than any one individual thing. They include:
* A tendency to play all the stars, rather than look to balance the side (albeit this is getting a little better under Hodgson). One only needed to watch Beckham hobble through his last 20 caps to wonder whether the priority was winning football matches or ensuring that Goldenballs amassed enough appearances in the shirt to meet the demands of the FA’s increasingly powerful marketing team. Even at Euro 2012, we played Gerrard at defensive midfield, which – particularly with two attacking full backs – was a disaster waiting to happen. Gerrard has been a superb player in his time, but he was never in his life a decent DM, and Liverpool’s goals conceded tally in the previous season attested as much.
* “Lions in winter, lambs in summer”. The high velocity, pell-mell hectitude of the Premier League, coupled with the lack of a Winter break. We always seem to emerge at Summer tournaments looking utterly spent. We also always seem to struggle to play in any kind of heat, and probably have done since the athleticism involved in the top level game ramped up during the 90s.
* The paucity of English coaches. English football has produced half a dozen top class talents over the last 10-15 years. It hasn’t produced a single top class English manager. Hoddle was the last one in the post who could reasonably be considered a major talent, and even his subsequent career has done much to undermine that notion.
* Bad luck. England should, and probably would, have won Euro 2004 but for an injury to Rooney, who was absolutely on fire that Summer. On such things do month-long tournaments turn.
* Not entirely sure English football has moved with the times. Our players are often tremendously athletic, full of desire and very brave (the traditional hallmarks of the English game), but most of those features have diminished in importance over the last 40 years. We’re still a nation who derive huge pleasure from Terry Butcher’s blood-soaked shirt, but struggled to incorporate the likes of Hoddle and Scholes. Nations like Spain and Germany have undergone a sea-change in how they play the game since I was a kid. I’m not sure we’ve followed to the extent we might have.
* The media. Build ’em up and knock ’em down. There are times when the players have looked like they’d rather be anywhere but playing for the national side, and I can’t say I entirely blame them. The pressure is enormous, as great as in any country bar maybe Brazil, and the consequences of failure are harsh. Rooney, for one, definitely stopped bothering quite so much for a spell in his mid 20s.
Incidentally, I always think Italy are a useful point of comparative reference for us. Consider the players available to us ten years ago. Then look at the Italian XI who won a World Cup final in 2006:
Buffon
Zambrotta
Cannavaro
Materazzi
Grosso
Camoranesi
Gattuso
Pirlo
Perrotta
Totti
Toni
Some very good players there, a couple who were top class, but hardly a side for the ages.
Now look at the Italian side who ran rings round us at Euro 2012 (albeit they needed pens to beat us).
Buffon
Balzaretti
Abate
Barzagli Booked
Bonucci
Marchisio
De Rossi
Montolivo
Pirlo
Balotelli
Cassano
A middling side, marshaled by Pirlo, a player with a footballing brain the size of a small planet. If there’s one thing English football has historically struggled to produce, it’s players with brains, and those we’ve had we’ve tended to distrust and leave out of the side. Too much respect for raw athleticism, too little for brains.
OOAA.
Great stuff Bingo, but I want to stick up for the 2006 Italian team. I think there were better first XIs during that tournament (Argentina come to mind), but Italy had the best squad. Lippi played five strikers during the tournament (Toni, Totti, Del Piero, Gilardino, and Inzaghi) and they all scored. He also had to play four central defenders due to injuries and suspensions. I think these days squads rather than teams win championships and Italy 2006 had quality in depth.
That’s an excellent point. Definitely agree that squads are increasingly important.
Good point, the team was a good one but Lippi’s influence was huge. They wouldn’t have won in 2006 without him in charge plus the imperious Cannavaro. Am I right in saying he retired post 2006 and they pretty much fell apart in Euro 2008 ?
Excellent post, bingo. The media have always had ludicrously high expectations of what England may achieve and their jingoistic hype brings extra pressures on the poor sods sent out to achieve the impossible.
True, but surely the media (and the rotten-tomato lobbing il grande pubblico) in Italy or Spain, for example, are at least as hyperbolic and vicious as in England?
Equally, the idea of Bild going easy on a consistently under-performing nationalmannschaft seems far-fetched.
Not sure who you’re responding to, but let’s look at actual records in World Cups alone, from (and including) ’66.
England – 1 win
Italy – 4 finals, 2 wins
Spain – 1 win
Germany – 7 finals, 3 wins
I would imagine, on the above alone, that the Italian and German media would have little cause to carp too often. Also, any expectations they may have in advance may have a little more grounding in reality.
I was responding to you Ian, merely to state that major European nations other than England hardly enjoy nuanced, long-term reporting on their national teams. It seems to me that despite the success of Italy, Germany and Spain their tabloids pounce on shortcomings at least as much as the Super Soaraway Sun et al…
The Italian press are as critical as the English press, perhaps even more so (the Italians take football far, far too seriously).
But they’re not nearly as jingoistic, which I think is what Bingo and Ian are poking at. There’s no equivalent of those stupid “Achtung Fritz!” headlines you see in the UK press. They don’t see the World Cup in those terms. They just want to win it.
I think he left after 2006 but came back for the 2010 World Cup (and probably wished he didn’t).
You’re right, he was vital for 2006. He left Cassano at home because he knew that despite his talent he would be disruptive in the dressing room. He was not afraid to make tough calls, dropping Toni and Totti when their form dipped and then bringing them back when he thought they were needed. Didn’t pick Inzaghi again after the latter was selfish in the Czech Republic game. All this done with the backdrop of the Calciopoli scandal. He had a great squad, but he made the right choices.
We’ve just had a brilliant Super League Grand Final between Leeds and Wigan. The new League structure has produced exciting games throughout the season and has provided the second tier teams with a testing but manageable route to the top level.
The New Zealanders are about to tour and for once England have a chance to prepare properly for the series, albeit without two of the greats in Sinfield and Peacock. I remain optimistic that the gap at the top between Australia and England is closing.
…but a game only played by the North of England, NSW/Qld, and a couple of NZ teams. The idea of a League world cup is laughable.
And here (the view from inner western Sydney) it’s a game played by a bunch of thugs (all of them) and accused rapists (too many of them, see Canterbury Bulldogs news items). There was a stretch of a few years where the big season-launch media campaigns were effectively killed dead by some wildly inappropriate and/or fundamentally illegal and wrong-headed accusations against the anointed star.
Not that AFL is a wider stage, but at least Rugby Union is a bit more of a more wide-spread.
Scottish perspective
How about a number of key people involved with Rangers over the last four to five years currently being charged with fraud, conspiracy and serious organised crime at the High Court in Edinburgh? I’d say that was more of a nadir than the last-kick goal by Poland, the away defeat in Georgia, or Aberdeen’s baffling loss of form after a record-breaking start to the season.
I’m not sure what point you’re making here. A high-profile football club was acquired by an individual who had had insufficient due diligence performed on his chequered background. The liquidators who were later appointed (ones he’d requested) are also in the frame.
Criminals operate in many areas of commerce. Any cash-producing institution which has absurdly loyal customers (i.e. fans) would be of great interest to scumbags like the aforementioned.
Well said, ianess.
Here’s the individual in question, Mr. Craig Whyte, getting a famously warm Glaswegian reception following a recent court appearance. ‘Enjoy your time in Barlinnie Mr. Whyte’.
https://youtu.be/De6FOyEY85A
Dougie – as regards the tabloids, the point that I’m (clearly) labouring to make regards not only jingoism, but, in particular, the insane levels of expectation – pre-tournament – that the England team, of whatever quality, are required to meet. When, as often, they fail to meet these vastly inflated expectations, then they’re excoriated in the same rags that were responsible for the overblown hype in the first place.
I don’t read the foreign press, so can not comment, though I would expect they’d be similarly vicious when it comes to perceived failure. The Italian and the Germans do, as I pointed out for World Cups alone, have a good track record, so any pre-tournament hype would have some basis in past performance.
I lived in London for decades and would say that the average England fan was as contemptuous of the tabloids overestimating their team’s chances as I was.
All countries have their vicious tabloid papers, but as Ian rightly points out, the Italians and Germans have won trophies in recent memory, which rather takes the edge off the mania a little.
There are also other factors as well – I’ve spent a bit of time in both Germany and Italy talking to local fans, and they don’t suffer anywhere near the mania over untested individual players, or “Gazza-itis” as it’s sometimes called. Two years ago people were seriously suggesting that Andros Townsend could be a force in international football, on the basis of one of his many wildly lashed shots from 30 yards having miraculously found the net in a qualifying game. In no other footballing nation can so much expectation be generated on the basis of so little.
Why is this the case? Paul Gascoigne made his first England start almost exactly a year before Italia 90 kicked off. He wasn’t considered a shoo-in for the squad at that stage, but slowly edged his way into Bobby Robson’s thinking to the point where by the start of the tournament he was a member of the first team. He then exploded in form over the course of the summer, leading to those spectacular performances in the Quarter and Semi finals.
These were seminal games in the modern history of English football, and drew many millions of new fans to the sport in their aftermath, as has been extensively documented. They also made Gazza a global star. But, more than that, they cemented in the English psyche the mythos of a young player emerging from virtually nowhere and asserting himself onto the international game in a relatively short period of time. The hunger for a repeat of that phenomenon has been there in spades ever since; fed by positive similar experiences with Beckham and Owen in 1998 (finally selected by Hoddle after howls of outrage from the public, the former going on to demonstrate that the manager’s reservations about his maturity may have been justified at that juncture) and Rooney in 2004, undiminished by many a false idol in the years since.
We heap expectation on our players, and particularly our young players, in a way that few other nations do, because we’ve been starved of hope, and it’s easy to find hope in those who have yet to be properly tested. The backlash is then nearly always as severe as the hype is unwarranted.
I would also suggest that nowhere are the papers so in love with the soap opera of football as in this country. Huge transfer “swoops”, “mind games”, yellow ties on transfer deadline day, the Beckhams’ star-studded World Cup Party, Mario Balotelli in general; our media loves the circus that’s built up around the sport, in some instances far more than they love the sport itself – that would be my chief objection to the majority of football writers plying their trade in England today. It’s much easier to write about whether managers are shaking hands than it is to explain why Chelsea’s defence has ceased to function properly this season, and the hacks are lazy. This laziness begets ignorance, and the ignorance perpetuates the jingoistic boom and bust cycle of expectation around the national side.
I could go on, and on, and on. I used to fervently believe that I’d see England win a major tournament in my lifetime. I don’t anymore, because as a footballing nation we have our heads well and firmly in the sand, and we’ll win nothing until the day that changes.