As conversation topic starters go, ‘Who do you reckon should get the England job then?’ scores impressively highly on the soon- to- be- in- a- coma- due- to- mind numbing- boredom factor, competing doggedly for Champions League placings with ‘Who’s on Jonathon Ross tonight?’, ‘Guess what Joan at work said about me today’, ‘Did you see that thing last night with whatisname?’ and ‘Has the £250,000 gone yet?’.
Every time I’ve sat with football fans since Wednesday night, I’ve been on edge, monitoring conversations, interrupting rudely anybody who takes a loaded sigh and troops off down the path marked: ‘see that match the other night? Fucking hell, of course I never wanted him in the first place…’.
Put enough like minded individuals around the same table though and the vacant England job isn’t so much an elephant in the room as a particularly dull elephant sized shadow foreign secretary eager to tell you all about the dream he had last night, it is the ultimate in hum-dum, it is Ewan McGregor motorcycling around the world and chatting to Parkinson about it, it is a dull enough conversation to have even the most vigilant non smokers hurling themselves out of the pub and into the sweet scented pollution of the smoking areas, and of course “everybody has an opinion”.
Except me. I do not have an opinion about who should get the England job simply because you can’t make me and life’s too short. So people tell me they think Martin O’ Neil would be perfect and instead of countering that Martin O’ Neil’s brand of sub Wimbledon, five men in midfield, Matt Elliot as emergency striker football is probably the absolute last thing that England need and where the hell are Villa in the league and yes he won championships with Celtic but, for Christ’s sake, the hysterical maid out of Tom & Jerry could have won championships with Celtic, especially with Rangers in one of their silly little moods they appear to get themselves in every couple of years, I nod my head, mumble words that even I don’t quite catch, sip my drink tentatively and eye up the salivation of the South Park quiz machine.
By the time the resident wit has cracked the obligatory ‘Maybe we should give Sven another shot!’ rib-tickler, it is fourteen hours since I last verbally communicated with the group, my mummers have evolved into an odd brand of strained tics and elongated vowels, like I’m Gollum and I’m paired with a particularly slow witted Pictionary partner, and I bitterly wonder why we stopped talking about the new series of ‘The Wire’ and what I would do to every member of the Dragon’s Den panel, given an empty room, a blow torch and a judge’s immunity and reflect that George Costanza was right and conversations must “resolve of their own momentum” and not simply be changed on the whim of a cretin who read something vaguely interesting about the F.A’s interviewing policy that apparently merits parroting.
For a brief shining moment I thought I might have something remotely interesting to say about the situation, along the lines of ‘how ironic that Gus Hiddink-who would be a perfect candidate for the job- is the one person who benefited most from McClaren’s ineptitude’, but, as any fan of tedious stand up comedy routines would point out, that’s not actually all that ironic and, anyway, everybody else seems to have made the same connection and, arf, arf, did you see that dozy umbrella he was hiding under the other night and of course I would never have gave him the job in the first place and at this point we’re right back where we bloody started and I’m not so much losing the will to live, more giving up on it completely and resolving to order a new one off Amazon as soon as I get a minute.
The underlying problem is, of course, that I don’t care. To me and, I suspect, most football fans the England manager is little more than an irritant, Les Dawson’s interfering mother-in-law, if the national coach were a writing device, he would be a clunky piece of exposition crowbarred in to an already lazily plotted costume drama.
The England manager’s only reason for existing appears to be to sit smugly next to your chairmen, munching biscuits and plotting to bring on your promising creative midfielder the Wednesday before the derby match at the weekend in the spiteful hope he does his leg in, at which point he can be all indignant and stress to the plebs the importance of international friendlies. They can be condescending with it like Sven, or brash with it like Venables or slightly unhinged and insane with it like Keegan but their primary function remains the same. England managers live to fuck with you and your team.
People are talking about Fabio Capello, and he seems to want it, which is a fine idea, but not as fine an idea as just scrapping the national team altogether, getting rid of its phone number, avoiding eye contact at work and clumsily attempting to chat up its best mate when we’re pissed in Yates’s wine lodge.
This won’t happen, of course, so whatever, balls to it, give it to Capello, if you must. Or bring back Kevin Keegan. Or give Cerys Matthews a shot at it, or Paulie Walnuts, or the bloke that plays Harold Bishop in Neighbors.
If you absolutely have to, get a copy of the sex offenders register, a blindfold and a biro and pick a name at random, do whatever the hell you want to do, just don’t expect me to participate in the selection, because I am incapable of expressing how little I care about the whole sodding issue.
chrismackin.wordpress.com
The holders - glad they’re out, they were pants too.