Try as I might I can’t get overly excited about Wimbledon—I’m more of a football and cricket man. So Boris Johnson’s column this morning on why England under-achieve at football caught my eye. Here’s the nub of his argument:
we should now launch a merciless Kulturkampf against every feature of modern Britain that is inimical to our competitive success. We should summon up our courage and tell our ballooning children to put down their beastly PlayStations and go and play outside. We should encourage them to walk or cycle to school. We should stop the sale of school playing fields. We should finally abandon the ethic of “all must have prizes”.
I’d agree with all this but I’d add something else: players receive the trappings of success before they have actually achieved anything. Kieron Dyer is a classic example of this. He’s never won a domestic trophy or scored a goal for his country but when he’s fit he swans around in white boots, gets bolshy when asked to play out of position and generally acts as if he deserves to be treated like a proven world-class performer which he is not.
Dyer is far from alone in this. As Stephen says, can you imagine an English Cesc Fabergas not going into a strop if he was asked to sit on the bench for most of the tournament? The brutal truth is that even if England had qualified for the European Championship we would have made little impact. Clive is right that it is hard to imagine us beating any of the 16 teams apart from Greece and, perhaps, Romania.
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