About a week on from the latest unfortunate member to take up the reigns on the well-respected but rarely successful horse that is the England team, the papers, magazines and the social networking sites are abound with fake quotes replacing “R”s with “W”s and slideshows of owls who look like the ill-fated surfer of the England football team-shaped wave. Indeed, Roy Hodgson has taken over the England manager’s job, as you may or may not have heard, causing a flurry of unfunny articles from awful newspapers focusing on Hodgson’s inability to pronounce the “R” noise as the rest of the population do. But what does this all mean? Is it just a plethora of “friendly banter” to welcome him to the job? Yes, but I think there may be some underlying meaning.
Lets look at what we’re dealing with here, just in case it isn’t quite clear to anyone who has luckily managed to avoid the whole horrendously dull and over-publicised scenario. The Sun, breeder of morons and murderer of journalism, once again hit another new low with the headline of “Bwing on the Euwos!” with the sub-headline of “We’ll see you in Ukwaine against Fwance”, just to bombard the fact he has a speech impediment home a tad more. Now, before abuse gets hurled at me for being a killjoy or a partypooper, I would like to say that I am not against this for the offence caused to Roy like some people are sayng. I’m sure Roy couldn’t give a toss what The Sun put in their paper, but the point I would like to make is the fact that this is not the first time we have seen this type of behaviour from the press before.
The England manager, in a country in which football unites the country together every two years together in a melting pot of sensationalism and national pride to see England crash out of the applicable tournament around the quarter final stage, is generally regarded as somewhat of a king. As members of the English public, the construction of the England manager and what he should be in our collective minds is someone who can do no wrong; a God type figure who is perfect in every way, and intelligent and knowledgeable enough to finally get this “wonderful” and “talented” set of players to play well and live up to their expectations – by winning a tournament.
Many have tried and failed – those not worthy of the England manager’s job, which has no doubt been touted as “The Best Job in the World” by someone at some point. Indeed, none of these people since 1966 have been able to work out the secret code to get such a plethora of mighty English talent to combine in such a way that the trophy will just drop into our hands without having to do anything. Such unworthy people, disrespecting the whole of England by not providing us with the silverware we deserve with all the quality that we produce as a nation… Sound familiar?
What a ridiculous construction we have created for ourselves. This completely undeserved sense of entitlement that for some reason have, built on the fact we won the World Cup almost half a century ago, and our own creation that we selflessly provide “The Greatest League in the World” to the rest of the world for their own entertainment to improve their players with our high-paced, lots of passion league. And this plays out every time a new man steps up to the plate to take on this task – the task of getting a load of players with massive egos and far too much self belief, who have demonstrated repeatedly that they aren’t good enough to compete internationally. Of course the press, know this is true, deep down. Deep deep deep down. They know that England aren’t good enough. But that’s not going to sell many papers is it? So they take a different strategy – one of undermining and of disrespect to prepare for the inevitable.