England Expects Sweet FA

Well I wasn't going to bother. Blogging was getting me down. I was a rotten record, whingeing about the same cash-fuelled self-interested egocentric baastards who run, organise and play the beautiful game.

I stopped the blog. Then Leicester kept winning. Even Spurs perked up. Citeh were lacklustre. Chelsea a swirling pit of Mourinho-muddled masochism. Van Gaal looked more and more like a man who gone seven rounds with Tyson Fury (and after the first four rounds they'd probably thrown in a chaser to go with the pint).

What's more Middlesbrough, that great groaning loss at the core of my being, started to return the love. It was if I'd met up with the love of my schoolboy life and she hadn't been a cow to me all that time, she just didn't know how to say she loved me. But now she was paying me back big time.

I'm a football supporter. The confluence of Teesside triumph and the Fantastic Mr Foxes were directly down to my putting down my typing fingers and using them instead to gesture at Leave voters out of me window. (Don't get me on to that. Safe to say that when the ageing dullards who voted for it get senile and need their dumb arses wiping, they'll find the care home has lost its Eastern European workers and they'll just have to sit in their own shit for a couple of decades).

Any road England's summer of shame nearly prompted a response of more than 140 characters - which is precisely 139 more characters than there were in the England dressing-room during that tournament - and the exception to that should still be at school.

The game against Iceland was England's single worst performance of my lifetime. Yes Iceland were well-organised and plucky, but so's a Bernard Matthews turkey farm and you wouldn't think there's any meat products available that wouldn't surpass Bernard's.

What made it worse, beyond even Joe Hart's scarecrow hands, was the calamitous shitness of all the rest of the team. It was a highlights package of awfulness. Like a 'You've Been Framed' football special. That notorious free-kick was less Harry Kane and more Harry Hill. It couldn't have been more embarrassing and humiliating had the whole team's shorts fallen down simultaneously to reveal a collection of shit-stained buttocks.

I was pleased we lost. Never said that before about any team I support. We deserved nowt better.

(Briefly, well done Wales. but don;t get ahead of yourselves - you lost to England. That England.)

Unsurprisingly Roy Hodgson shuffled off to a quiet corner of the world where he is slowly disintegrating into vodka and heroin inspired catatonia - if he wasn't there already during the second half of his last match as boss.
His replacement? The lumbering bull-faced long-ball lummox that is Sam Allardyce. Well, his speciality was resurrecting the dead so his CV looked perfect. If you can save Sunderland, thn you could probably successfully reintroduce the dodo to the Pacific Islands.

Never mind that the Toon Army and the fans of West Ham - who now watch their team play at home with the same proximity as the French eye the white cliffs of Dover - could barely watch Big Sam's plebeian fare. At east he'd get the team doing what they were told and knowing their jobs. Apart from Wayne Rooney who could, apparently, pop off for a bag of sherbet lemons during the second half if that's what he wanted to do.

Now we've got a very nice man in charge - and believe me Southgate makes Roy Hodgson look like Bashar al-Assad - and all because the blobby fuckwit Big Sam couldn't keep his grasping greedy hands in his fucking pockets.

Mind you, don't blame the FA. When it comes to shady dealings, Sam has absolutely no previous whatsoever. He's whiter than white is Sam. Pure as the driven slush. Shearer says we're a laughing stock. That's nowt new. The only people overrating this England squad is the squad itself.

Chris Waddle gets it right. When the pressure's on, our players still lack technique and competence. But if the first thing you learn on a footy pitch is that you have to win, then the first thing you reward is getting the ball down the other end. Great when you're nine and the pitch is massive. Shit when you're twenty-nine and the opposition have a clue how to pass it to each other. Shit too when they put ten men behind the ball and ask you to be inventive. Thank God Thomas Edison wasn't an English footballer or we'd all still be sitting in the fucking dark,

I hope, genuinely, that Southgate does a good job, that Scotland don't rub our noses in the manure we've created, that Rooney becomes chief cheerleader and the likes of Alli, Stones, Rashford and Dier get to play, no questions asked. But reality has bitten, boys and girls.In the great rolling ocean that is international football, we are the bottom-feeders. Get used to it.