Football is rarely as bad, or as good, as you think it is. Last Saturday, England were utterly stifled by the world’s 174th ranked team, Andorra, who have learned somewhat effectively to avoid being dicked in every game by merely parking two large double-decker buses on the edge of the penalty area. A disastrous 2-0 win for England was condemned, as usual, by legions of armchair fans who believe their team have a divine right to simply turn up and win by a cricket score. Actually, from what I could see, watching most of the game on a mobile phone in a fine Birmingham pizza restaurant (I had extra jalapenos and mozzarella, if you must know) England weren’t that bad. But there’s no point in arguing: this is England. Those players are not fit to wear the shirt.
Then, our unfit to wear the shirt lads head off to Serbia, the world’s 32nd best team, standing just below Panama and Wales, but they will be “a stern test” in a “hostile environment“. “If they play anything like they did against Andorra,” we were told by pub bores everywhere, “it will be the end of the world as we know it. Sack the manager and pick some lads from the National League. THEY COULDN’T DO ANY WORSE.” However, soon it became clear that actually our brave lads were fit to wear the shirt after all. This was a quite magnificent demolition job. Onwards and upwards. Wasn’t it?
Well, yes. England were excellent but, just for the armchair fans and pub bores, let’s tip a metaphorical bucket of shit over the fine efforts of Thomas Tuchel and his charges. Serbia aren’t that good. Only a handful of their players play in the so-called elite European leagues, most of them are probably lower Premier League/Championship level. If, perhaps, Serbia had scored first, we might have seen a different result, a different pattern to the game, but they didn’t. We had gone from terrible to great in a matter of three days. In truth, we were somewhere in the middle, albeit nearer great than terrible.
It would have been an easy, relaxing watch had the game not been on ITV. Mark Pougatch is an irritating and lightweight presenter and the undoubtedly talented analysts, Roy Keane and Ian Wright, are clearly hampered by the regular need to “go for a break” every few minutes. And as for the commentary: has there ever been a worse pairing than main commentator Sam Matterface and ‘colour-commentator’ Lee Dixon? They are so bad, so caught up with their own self-indulgence, that they failed to notice until halfway through the first half that there was a phantom whistler in the crowd, that Serbia marked man to man from the first whistle, did not mention (or notice) that both national anthems were booed and whistled at by the opposing fans. That after, to quote the excellent Barney Ronay in in The Guardian, the England fans, “a bunch of semi-retired middle-aged plumbers from Kent on a late summer jolly” burst into a rendition of “Keir Starmer is a wanker“, followed by some selections from the Reform UK Ltd songbook, which duly encouraged the home fans to chant “Serbia Kosovo“. Matterface didn’t notice any of that, nor when a group of men in black T shirts arrived on the pitch, having been chased down their by some of their fellow “fans” which he suggested could have been down to a “medical emergency”. Who hasn’t witnessed a medical emergency when a group of fans have been chased out of the way by baton-carrying, gun-toting riot police? It was as if Matterface and Dixon weren’t even there?
I happen to think that England have a decent chance of winning next year’s World Cup. Germany are no great shakes (“BUT YOU CAN NEVER WRITE THE GERMANS OFF”), Italy might not even make it for the third tournament running, France are a bit up and down, Portugal … oh sod Cristiano Ronaldo and Argentina have state pensioner Lionel Messi. But if we can get our best team out, and Spain have a bad day, well who knows? Frankly, we have nothing to be scared of, aside from a sense of bloated expectations, entitlement and the shock presence of Andorra in the final stages.
To repeat, we are never as bad as folk say we are and we are never as good as we think we are. Players, whether in top stadia or the local park, play to win. I don’t buy the notion that players don’t play because they are pampered millionaires. It’s much more complicated than that. But you know what will happen in 2026. The media will have crowned England champions before our brave lads even step on the plane, confident in the knowledge that within a few weeks they will be able to put the boot in to our gutless wasters.
We have, as I said, a decent chance, rather than claiming we’re going to win the World Cup, which is a far better mindset. But don’t expect the “semi-retired middle-aged plumbers from Kent” to quite see it that way when they’re cheering on Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson in USA USA USA 2026 and we go a goal down to an amateur team of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers from a small outpost in Africa. Sack the manager, sack the players, sack the prime minister. It was always thus, I’m afraid, and, as Bruce Hornsby put it, albeit in a slightly different context, some things will never change.
