I would love it if the England football team win the World Cup. Not necessarily because they are the best team in the tournament, but just to shut up those who seem to spend their waking hours looking for a reason to attack the manager. Eriksson isn't in the same position as Mourinho, Wenger, Ferguson etc. He can't fill the team with overseas imports, or lash out £30 million on a new player to fill a gap. He is blessed with the players we've got, and in the few weeks a year he has them he has to try to blend them into a team. When he took over from Keegan six years ago we didn't even look like we were going to qualify for the World Cup Finals. Now, we are not only going, we have a realistic chance of getting to at least the semi-final stages, and if Rooney had been fit, we may even have gone all the way. I suspect most of the hostility to Sven is from the Londoncentric media because he doesn't pick all of their favourite Spurs players at the same time, or because he wasn't cheerful chirpy cockney Terry Veneables (one of THE most overrated managers in football history)... oh yes, and the usual diet of xenophobia that has persisted since his appointment, which prompted the useless Jeff Powell to write this crap at the time: "So, the mother country of football, birthplace of the greatest game, has finally gone from the cradle to the shame. We've sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness." If there was just one reason to win the tournament, it would be sufficient just to shove those words up Powell's rectum!
PS - Whilst we are talking football... I note that Karren Brady, Managing Director of the porno merchants football club, has criticised Birmingham City Councillors. Brady says that they are "leading the City into mediocrity". Whilst I wouldn't argue with the gorgeous pouting Karren's assessment of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition's dreadful record over the last two years, the words "glass", "houses" and "stones" come to mind.
