Why English footballers are so useless

It is late in the evening. You’re in a bar. You’ve had quite a bit to drink but you are conversing with the fragrant young lady you found hanging around in there. You find her quite attractive and are possibly keen for things to proceed. What should you say to her, to speed things along? Wayne Rooney’s contribution is unbeat-able: ‘Are those tits real?’ That’s certainly the gambit I would go with if I ever find myself in a similar situation with, say, Princess Michael of Kent or Shami Chakrabarti. Wayne said it to ‘party girl’ Laura Simpson shortly before he got charged with drink-driving. Now he’s in trouble with the police and his wife, Coleen. I don’t think Coleen is too bothered about the driving charge.

As all of this was happening, the England football team (sans Jo-Jo, the Incredible Dog-Faced Man) were recovering from their exertions against our great footballing rivals, Malta. A small island populated by 421,000 souls. A larger island, populated by fewer people — Iceland — knocked England out of the last tournament we were in, so there was good reason for worry. The ITV commentators were bigging up the Malta lads. ‘He turned in some very useful performances for Welling,’ one of them said admiringly about a chap scampering around the middle of the park.

The England players (average wages of around £100,000 per week) laboured and laboured, with the wit, guile, ingenuity and pace of a recently gassed badger. They won, sure enough, 4-0, with three goals in the last five minutes putting an unwarranted gloss on the whole dismal process. Three days later they were at it again, playing the might of Slovakia.

These are the kinds of team we play most of the time — tiny countries which were not countries at all 30 years ago, or tiny islands, or scantily populated countries that are not, according to the UN, proper countries at all (that’s Scotland, then).