Nationwide Messi Syndrome

By Mark Daniell

21/06/2010

The trouble with England is that everyone wants to be England manager. Everyone in the pub, everyone in the tube, everyone in the country. Even those who should know better because they actually have some understanding of what a load of shitballs it might be, that’s to say the players, want to be England manager. 

This is amazing when you think about it, because it is without doubt the single job in the country that invites grief and ill-feeling. Even Prime Minister. Sure, when you’re PM you get a lot of hostility, but it’s all vocalised by the leader of the opposition. It’s put coherently in front of you and you’re given time to defend your actions, to explain your decisions. The England football manager just gets a barrage of snide, ill-researched jibes all wilfully ignoring statistics and common sense, and instead drawing on coincidental accounts from fifty years ago. You can’t argue with that. 

Yesterday The Sunday Times asked its columnists, including two Premiership managers, which formation they’d play for the Slovenia game. Between them they came up with five totally different line-ups. Who’s to say that any one of those is better than the current set up? Well they all think that, anything’s better than the current set up, right? And who’s to say any one of those is better than the other? Well, that depends. Each one thinks his is the best, obviously, but that’s not the point. The point is they’re all better than Capello’s. That’s a given. Personally I love the way we choose to overlook the fact that he successfully managed a difficult qualifying group with this exact formation, hasn’t lost a game so far and is in a tidy situation to go through as group winners, in favour of: Four million quid?? We pay him four million quid for that??

Just to remind you, the only team to have definitely qualified after two games is Brazil. And even they had an unconvincing 2-1 win over North Korea. Even Argentina, with two wins and five goals under their belt, are not guaranteed of going through. While Italy, Germany, Spain and France are all in the same or worse situations than us. Italy drew with New Zealand for Pete’s sake! Germany missed a penalty! Spain!! Spain have actually lost!!!

Best of all we’ve had a revolt by the England players. “We want Joe Cole to play.” “We want 4 2 3 1.” “We want colder ice in our drinks.” Player power is synonymous with weak leadership, Capello isn’t going to listen to that jive talk, he’s going to stick to 4 4 2 and he’s going to tell his players to start playing football and win the game.

As football fans we generally favour ignoring our civilised selves and instead give wind to our most basic impulses: delusion, greed, pride, all those beautiful attributes. We want to win, we want to win comprehensively and we want to win now! If we don’t get that we stamp our feet and demand people be fired. Even if that means we have to ignore all the evidence that suggests it’s a bad idea. 

The real issue here is that the England players haven’t yet stepped up to what’s being asked of them. It’s very similar, if on a shorter time scale, to what Argentina have been moaning about for over a year: The Messi syndrome. Believe me, you think the press is bad here, in Argentina the knives were out. How come he’s so great for his club and so shit for Argentina? Doesn’t he love Argentina? Doesn’t he have the support? Is he played out of position? Is the manager a mentalist? It’s as if each player in England is suffering a short term bout of Messi syndrome. 

Interestingly Messi has begun to play like his normal self this World Cup, so it might be revealing to see which piece of ‘newspaper advice’ Maradona followed in order to achieve this. And the answer is, obviously, none. This is Maradona, he doesn’t follow advice unless it’s wearing a mask. All he did was stick to his guns and kiss his players. Score loads of goals for me kids, and I’ll give you more kisses. And they have. It probably won’t be good enough to win them any goldware, but at least they look like they’re having fun. Maradona has managed to light a fire under his team, he’s got them playing for each other and for themselves. He’s got them enjoying themselves. England by contrast, look like a bunch of miserable old spinsters forced out of their front rooms while Titchmarsh is on telly. 

It’s a bit like making a lasagne. You buy all the freshest ingredients, follow the same old family recipe and then find out the oven won’t turn on. Then as you stand wondering how to fix the gas, punters in the street start chipping in:

“What you need is more paprika. That’ll do it.”

“No, what he needs is to mix some veal in with the beef. That’s the real lasagne way.”

“Less tomato, the tomato is a modern invention.”

“I’d rather roast chicken.”

“Chilli flakes! Chilli flakes! Why won’t anyone LISTEN TO ME?!?!”

“Have you thought of a vegetarian lasagne?”

“You shut up!”

“He needs to layer the Bechamel between the pasta and the meat, not leave it alone on top! Who puts Bechamel out of position like that? Idiot!!”

“Why can’t anyone talk about anything other than cooking??? What’s wrong with everyone?”

The irony is of course that these guys will score a couple of goals and all will be forgotten. Until the next time.