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Football is, supposedly, part of the entertainment industry,
and the bottom line of the entertainment industry is bums on seats.
The paying punter is king and what he says, goes.
The footballing calendar becomes ever more packed, the bloated spectacle
of the Champions League and the UEFA Cup ensures that more and more
countries get some kind of representation until late in the season,
so more and more TV companies can bid for the rights and even more
meaningless games can get crammed into the schedule to satisfy that
key demographic, the insomniac desperate for a live game fix at
4am on a Tuesday. Don’t worry, it’ll happen.
Yet in one area, the demands of Joe Public fall upon the deafest
of ears. No, it’s not the call for the perpetual exclusion
of Steve McClaren from the England dressing room. It’s the
desire of the majority of the people in the four nations to see
the Home Internationals restored to the fixture list as a proper
end of season climax.
The common objection is that there simply isn’t room to fit
in another three international fixtures, though this rarely stops
the national teams heading off on crucial fact finding missions
to play a Select Hong Kong XI, a suitably daunting task for any
international, especially as he needs to fit in shopping time with
his Roy Keane approved WAG.
Unsurprisingly, most such summer tours are littered with squad withdrawals,
players finding all sorts of injuries that didn’t keep them
out of the previous week’s FA Cup Final or Premier League deciders.
And who can blame them?
Who wants to fly halfway around the world for a nothing game that
takes a fortnight out of their holidays?
Better by far, surely, to stay in the UK and to play in three meaty
internationals where there’s real pressure, where the result
matters, and where you can find out which players can hack it under
competitive conditions and which can’t in front of crowds desperate
to see their side come out on top.
Sadly, until a TV company puts up a big enough cheque to get the
respective associations back around the negotiating table, a full
scale home international series will not happen, largely because
the English FA thinks they’re above it.
That’s the FA who we charge with upholding the principles and
traditions of the game, only to find they’re short on both.
So let’s offer up a suggestion shall we, something that maybe
the English FA might like to consider, something that could finally
restore these grand old fixtures. If the senior squad is busy gallivanting
around the globe to build up crucial experience of match conditions
in Latvia, why not reintroduce the Home Internationals as an Under
21 or Under 23 tournament?
Or have it as a full international competition where England and
/ or any of the other nations choose only to select players who
are from that younger age group, giving Wales the freedom to play
their full side should they wish and Stuart Pearce the chance to
test his charges out against more senior opposition as a stepping
stone towards their goal, the full national team?
We saw during the summer how an Under 21 competition can capture
the imagination as the European Championships unfolded in Holland.
Played out on a domestic level, giving us the chance to watch the
next generation of international stars, it would be every bit as
appealing, probably more so given the obvious national pride that
it would engender.
But above all, it would give the fan what they want, it would give
every country a chance to stick it to England once gain, it would
offer a real showpiece ending to the season instead of it petering
out in irrelevant friendlies and, above all, it would reinstate
England against Scotland. After all, how can the new Wembley consider
itself to be a proper stadium until the Scots have ripped it to
pieces again?
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