Club vs Country

Last updated : 07 September 2007 By Tom Chivers
They were a sort of glamorous break from the weekly work of league competition. Now, they grate - an unnecessary distraction from the important business. Here's why.

There's an obvious reason to dislike international week; club-oriented selfishness. Players often come back broken - mercifully poor Michael Owen had left us when he collapsed like a punctured accordion on the pitch in Cologne, but if Gerrard plays with a broken toe next week I will be watching from behind the sofa - and the simple wear-and-tear is a strain on already overworked players. On top of that, there's capricious selection (how on earth does Jamie Carragher get sidelined behind the physio's dreams that are Jonathan Woodgate and Ledley King? Not that I'm complaining - all the more Jamie for us - but it's an unwarranted blow to the man's pride), and it either gets in the way of much-needed training when you're struggling, or derails hard-earned momentum when you're on form. And, after ten goals in two games, we are on form, on song and on top of the table. Personally, I could have done without all our best players being stolen for two weeks to go and play indifferent football for either a grinning, permatanned simpleton (if they're English) or an overweight, underachieving racist (if they're Spanish).

Of course, if I cared just as much about England's success as I do about Liverpool's, then this would be a necessary evil. But it's been a long time since I did - and that's because international breaks have intrinsic problems that make them impossible really to enjoy.

The first of these is that weekends are meant to be about vast unbroken stretches of time spent in the pub or on your sofa watching football. If you've got the time (and a local pub with an illegal Scandinavian satellite feed, which of course this column does not condone), you could conceivably spend from 12:45pm to 7pm on Saturday and 2pm to 6pm on a Sunday watching football pretty much constantly. Four hundred and fifty minutes (plus stoppage time) of Premiership football, marred only by Andy Gray's increasingly inane burblings and the prohibitive cost of beer. When international weeks come around, by contrast, we are expected to make do with one England game for the entire weekend, with perhaps some paltry scraps of Scotland getting humiliated by the Faroe Islands, again, as an appetiser.

This would be slightly more bearable if the England games in question were at least interesting. But be honest - when was the last time the Three Lions™ got your blood pumping? If I think back, deep into the mists of time, I can just about remember Sven's honeymoon period; a precious memory of the 5-1 away demolition of Germany in September 2001. That game had the three key elements for a thriller - first, it meant something (we pretty much had to win to qualify); second, our adversaries were worthy (the English might not like Germany, but you'd have to be an idiot not to respect their national team); and third, the game itself was an absolute stormer. Admittedly that was made possible by some truly uncharacteristic and indeed embarrassing defending by the home side, but still, it was glorious, and made even better by the fact that all three scorers were Liverpool players. The game after that was also a nail-biter, a 2-2 draw scraped against Greece courtesy of that Beckham free-kick in the 92nd minute which just dragged us through as group winners.

They were six years ago. What good games have England been involved with since then? We can discount the actual tournaments; the whimpering dismissal at the quarter-final stage is a longstanding national tradition, and the football itself is invariably dull, timid and unwatchable. Friendlies have long since become a substitution-muddled waste of time that besmirch what's left of the nation's good name and would be better replaced by a two-week training camp.

So that leaves us with qualifiers. If we take my three criteria for a good game of football - worthy adversaries, important result, and exciting play - and try to apply them to the qualifying games since the two mentioned above, what have we got? Well, the best team we've played has been Turkey. The nation was overjoyed at a 0-0 draw against Turkey, for God's sake; a glorious opponent they are not. Equally, the games themselves have been cagey and defensive. The fact that we recently went in to half-time 0-0 against Andorra - a ski resort; it's like being kept scoreless by the staff of Butlins - says it all.

The fact that for years we weren't too concerned about the results is, in fact, a compliment to Sven. Qualification for both Euro 2004 and Germany 2006 were wrapped up without too much fuss. McClaren, on the other hand, seems determined to bring some excitement back. Croatia are a respectable side, nothing more; losing 2-0, and deservedly so, was not acceptable. As for drawing 0-0 in Israel, let alone at home to Macedonia, the less said the better. The most charitable spin I can put on it is that he is sportingly giving the lesser teams a seven-point headstart.

But all of this - all the incompetence, all the turgid, boring football, all the bewildering substitutions and selections, everything - could be at least partly forgiven if the England staff were remotely likeable. Seriously, though, how can anyone bring themselves to cheer for Ashley Cole, a primping midget with a God complex and a Craig David beard who is in writing saying he "nearly swerved off the road" with rage at hearing he was being offered £55,000 a week instead of £60,000? As for Frank Lampard, here is a man so wildly oversensitive that when Joey Barton made his spot-on observations about the team ("We got beat in the quarter-finals. I played like sh*t. Here's my book"), he threw a temper-tantrum that wouldn't have looked out of place in a crèche. Rio Ferdinand is a self-absorbed idiot who seems to be trying to take the place of Jeremy Beadle in the national consciousness ("You've Been Merked" - good Lord) and is either a) a drugs cheat or b) a halfwit of such monumental proportions I'm surprised he remembers to breathe. Possibly both. And the manager…

...I honestly don't know where to begin. His appearance (you've-been-Tangoed year-round tan, glowing white teeth, desperate attempt to cover rapidly advancing baldness with a feeble half-quiff-half-combover) is bad enough; but add it to his incompetence, blandly smirking public persona, and obviously media-trained "let's-take-the-positives-from-this-four-nil-defeat" idiocy, and what you have is a national embarrassment, a man the Guardian memorably, and accurately, called Second-Choice Steve; an England manager whose sum trophy haul at club level was one League Cup. The faceless, witless buffoons at the FA who appointed him in such shambolic fashion shouldn't escape censure either.

A common discussion among football fans is the "which would you rather - England win the World Cup or your club win the Premiership?" I suspect that, for most people in both the Red and the Blue halves of the People's Republic of Merseyside, it's hardly a debate at all. But, now that Liverpool winning the title feels like a (faint) possibility for the first time in years, I find myself moving from polite indifference towards the national team to actively cursing it. If Gerrard gets injured against Israel, I fear I might be cheering for Russia in the next game. Пойдите домой, Мччлрен вы муппет, as they say in Moscow.