The Lions go hungry

I don’t know if any of you were watching that England game. Maybe like me you did so half reluctantly, disliking the players because they are in the main ignorant, overpaid, under-achieving and consumed with hubris. But if you did you will have felt that familiar despond; it was a game the Swiss deserved to win. Again I was reminded of that very old quote – must be going back thirty years I would guess – from the then manager of Yugoslavia: “England, the lions of autumn, are but lambs come the spring.” To which he might have added “and remain so for the summer.” We are not terribly good at any time of the year, but especially poor in the spring and early summer.

More depressing than the result, though, was the performance of one or two players who have been heralded as the next generation of stars to lift us back to our rightful berth as world champions. Theo Walcott, for example, was utterly without wit, pace or ball control.

I remember sitting in front of the TV watching England play West Germany round about this time in 1970. Those three goals scored by the Germans were, I thought, an aberration, a combination of bad luck, a bad call from Sir Alf and devious Mexicans poisoning the players with their awful food. I clung on to the notion that each successive defeat was an aberration until about June 1978, when the Scots were allowed into the World Cup again and we weren’t.