Today is the longest day of the year and with it we expect to be somewhere near mid-summer. The last few days we have enjoyed some reasonable weather; not very hot and not very sunny, but pleasant enough For the last week or so the eyes of the male half of the world have been mainly concentrated on events in Brazil — if we ignore the lunatics in the Middle East — hosting the football World Cup for the first time. Brazil is a huge country stretching to 3,000 miles from north to south and a similar distance from east to west. It covers an area of 3.3 million square miles and has a population of about 200 million. Of course it is an emerging nation still escaping the legacy of military dictatorship, still with many severe problems and substantial differences in living standards. Almost certainly they will find that they have spent too much money on putting on this World Cup — about £10 billion when the initial estimate was only £1 billion. We have estimators like that in Britain. But the Brazilians are trying to put on a grand carnival that everyone can enjoy.
There will be some exceptions to the universal enjoyment of the carnival In football, the current world champions, Spain, have been knocked out in the preliminary rounds and will be leaving for home next week. This was a great shock and surely completely unexpected. The Spanish team may be in a period of decline — but not so soon and so rapidly.
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Less of a shock has been England's elimination. This team left for Brazil with high hopes but low expectations. England football teams in world tournaments is a perpetual case of hope triumphing over expectations. But, perhaps we have now come to the state of expecting nothing and being satisfied. As England failures go, their performance at this World Cup was up there with the worst of them. Not since 1950 have we managed to lose both of our first two opening matches and not since 1958 have we been eliminated at the group stage..We were told by the pundits that this Group D was a modest collection of teams and that England would be sure to progress to the knock-out stages. No. They were beaten by a far from grand Italian team and then humiliated by Uruguay. I say humiliated even though the studio pundits have striven to excuse this teams failings and point to the positives. To talk of positives in this context is to hide from the truths. The England football team is like a Wagner opera, which, said Rossini, has some wonderful moments but some terrible half-hours. That sums up their efforts.
After losing to Italy, came the total humiliation of defeat by Uruguay. This is a team made up of a very good player [Suarez] and many modest players existing on low wages and coming from a poorish country with a population of 3.4 million. Our Premier League has the highest paid players in the world — Wayne Rooney is at the top of the list with his £300,000 PER WEEK salary. I think Rooney is a good player but not a great one. Of the top ten highest paid footballers in the world eight play in the Premier League and in a country [England] with a population of 53 million, we consistently cannot produce a top-class team of eleven players to provide serious competition at international level.
Against modest Uruguay, England were disorganised and made many amateurish errors. Suarez, recovered from his knee injury was playing. The England captain is also Liverpool captain and plays with Suarez week in and week out. He knows what Suarez can do yet he was allowed to wander around the field often unwatched. England should have had a defender welded to Suarez throughout the match. They did not. Their defending was abysmal — Gary Cahill had some moments but overall they were poor.
After the loss to Uruguay it was still theoretically possible for England to qualify if Italy beat Costa Rica and England beat Costa Rica in their last game by a considerable margin. Now even that lifeline has gone. Costa Rica today defeated Italy 1 - 0 and go to the top of the group. Now England cannot qualify even if they defeat Costa Rica by a huge margin — and that is surely unlikely against a team that has already defeated both teams that have defeated England. Costa Rica is another poor country with a small population — 4.3 million — that is capable of making a decent football team — and against Italy they won in spite of being denied a certain penalty.
While, in recent years many of our sports men and women have been achieving great things. Andy Murray at Wimbledon; bike men and women in track and on road with Chris Hoy, Mark Cavendish, Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome, et al; athletes at the Olympics; the rugby team wins the Six Nations, etc. There was the cricket disaster in Australia but with staggering consistency the football team fails again and again. English football is awash with money but still there is no sign of a decent football team emerging. Is the life of a footballer in England too easy? Do they think of nothing more than WAGs and lifestyles? Is their only worry the colour of the next Ferrari? Wayne Rooney could buy a new Ferrari with four days pay.— something I could only achieve after a good number of years and assuming that I could cut all my other expenditures to zero.
Mattews, Lofthouse and Finney will be rolling in their graves.
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