FIFA World Cup 2014

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

The Sun spoiled Euro 96 for me with their racist WWII headline, ever since then I felt ashamed to be English and felt like we were the bad guys.

And that was when the german team were LOADED with fucking tossers. Scholl, Moller, Sammer, Effenberg. Fuck me what a despicable set of bastards they were.

[thraxx]

Is a bit odd that Bruce never got a look in, but he did play for unfashionable clubs and then Man U who were languishing in the 80s.  Also, there were a lot of good centre backs ahead of him - england tended to play one 'hardman' CB (Adams, Butcher) and the other CB a bit more cultured (Pallister, Walker, Wright).  I can't imagine that that left much space for Bruce, even though it seems hard to imagine that Bobby Robson would have left out a fellow north-east mucker.

Today I find it hard to cast aside club biases in internationals, but in those days it was never a problem for me.  It's all just panto in the end anyway.

[chand]

Can't believe they're taking Rooney to a major tournament again.

Yes, I also wonder why they're taking Wayne Rooney, England's fifth top scorer of all time, second top scorer in the league this season, six goals in his last 11 games for England. I'm not exactly the dude's biggest fan but I don't think taking Wayne Rooney as one of the four strikers is among the more baffling decisions an England manager has made.

[doppelkorn]

The Sun spoiled Euro 96 for me with their racist WWII headline, ever since then I felt ashamed to be English and felt like we were the bad guys.

Isn't that the same thing but opposite of people saying they're "proud to be English" based on the noble actions of another English person? (which CaB dislikes)

[monkfromhavana]

Anyway, forget England. Here's the provisional Algeria squad!

Goalkeepers: Izzedine Doukha (USM El-Harrach), Rais M'bolhi (CSKA Sofia), Cedric Si Mohamed (CS Constantine), Mohamed Lamine Zemmamouche (USM Alger).

Defenders: Essaid Belkalem (Watford, on loan from Granada), Madjid Bougherra (Lekhwya Club), Liassine Cadamuro (Mallorca), Faouzi Ghoualm (Napoli), Rafik Halliche (Academica Coimbra), Nacereddine Khoualed (USM Alger), Aissa Mandi (Stade Reims), Carl Medjani (Valenciennes), Djamel Mesbah (Livorno), Mehdi Mostefa (AC Ajaccio).

Midfielders: Nabil Bentaleb (Tottenham), Ryad Boudebouz (Bastia), Yasine Brahimi (Granada), Adlene Guedioura (Crystal Palace), Amir Karaoui (Entente de Setif), Medhi Lacen (Getafe), Saphir Taider (Inter Milan), Hassan Yebda (Udinese).

Forwards: Abdelmoumene Djabou (Club Africain), Rafik Djebbour (Nottingham Forest, on loan from Olympiakos), Sofiane Feghouli (Valencia), Nabil Ghilas (Porto), Foued Kadir (Rennes), Riyad Mahrez (Leicester), Islam Slimani (Sporting Lisbon), Hilal Soudani (Dinamo Zagreb).

Magic!

[George Oscar Bluth II]

People talking about all the 'cunts' in the England squad, I reckon this is the least cunty England squad in a long time. No Rio, no Terry, no Ashley Cole. The cuntiest member is actually 'Fat' Frank Lampard, who was always the least cunty of the Chelsea Cunt Trinity. Followed, of course, by Stevie 'Phil Collins' Gerrard.

The Sun spoiled Euro 96 for me with their racist WWII headline, ever since then I felt ashamed to be English and felt like we were the bad guys.

I love a bit of Sun bashing, but ACTUNG SURRENDER was actually the work of the Daily Mirror, edited at the time by...Piers Morgan

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Was it?? I was certain otherwise...

Not surprised it could've been Morgan's work, what a fucking prick, but I was so sure it was The Sun.

[chand]

I can never remember why we all hate Lampard. Still, happy to go along it with it, like.

[Blinder Data]

Plays for Chelsea and is proud of that fact = certified cunto

I've read he's personally a nice guy and remarkably intelligent for a footballer BUT his uncle is Harry Redknapp and I'm quite sure it was him that leaked Roy Hodgson's 'feed the monkey' nonsense to the press right after England qualified (the Sun journalist who wrote the piece ghost-scripted Lampard's books, I believe). He's at the heart of the Redknapp media love-in and when football finally gets the financial version of Operation Yewtree he will do his best to escape censure for his role in the organisation of an AFRICAN CHILD PROSTITUTE RING for Uncle 'Arry's SORDID Monaco-based pension INVESTMENT PLAN.

Please ignore the above, I'm a bit ill

[George Oscar Bluth II]

Was it?? I was certain otherwise...

Not surprised it could've been Morgan's work, what a fucking prick, but I was so sure it was The Sun.

Note the "by the editor" bit too. Holy shit it's bad.

[buttgammon]

Fucking hell, the WWII stuff is hideous. I'm never as xenophobic towards the majority of my friends and half of my family as when I see England football fans reference the war. When they played Germany last time, the TV cameras showed pictures of fans in 1940s military fancy dress and I very nearly turned it off. In the end, I compromised on watching with the sound muted to stop any hysterial commentary/dodgy chants from giving me an aneurysm.

Out of interest, how do people react to this idiocy in Germany? Is it with embarrassed bemusement as I expect? They do love 'Three Lions', after all.

[Beagle 2]

It's like everybody dressing up as Simon Weston when we play Argentina. At least when we attack countries these days we leave them without the necessary infrastructure to field an international team we might meet in a major tournament.

[thepuffpastryhangman]

^
^ etc

Wasn't Frankie Lamps involved in a high stakes (£100k or whatever) bet with another player about scoring at some major tournament? (Leading him to take pot shots rather than playing for the team)

Also, apart from their manager, it's almost impossibly to like anything to do with Chelsea.

[Cleaners From Venus]

The Germans, in my experience, find it quite amusing. They regard us rather like a supervillain looks at Scrappy Doo.

[Beagle 2]

Wasn't Frankie Lamps involved in a high stakes (£100k or whatever) bet with another player about scoring at some major tournament? (Leading him to take pot shots rather than playing for the team)

Unless he's been doing this for his entire career it would have been tough to spot the difference.

[The Duck Man]

Defenders: Essaid Belkalem (Watford, on loan from Granada)

Belkalem is a colossal donkey. If they pick him I might have to downgrade my prediction that they'll win the thing.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

Oh yes, here's why Lampard is so dislikable:

Consider Lampard's reflections after a fortnight spent on Roman Abramovich's yacht. "I suppose people imagine that as a Premiership footballer, my life is quite special," he hazards. "I would agree, but those two weeks opened my eyes to another world." Ah, a millionaire yearning to be a billionaire ... is there anything more charmless?

The odd intriguing detail emerges. As Steve Coogan's creation Paul Calf observed: "Inside every sack of shite, there's a spark of gold. Now, it might just be the wrapper off a Caramac, but it's there." Those willing to don the rubber gloves and sift through Totally Frank will learn that when Jose Mourinho informed Frank he was "the best player in the world", he chose the moment he was emerging from the shower. "I was confused," writes Frank, "and completely naked." Or the revelation that even as he took his penalty in Gelsenkirchen he was still infused with a sense of entitlement. "This is England's year," he was thinking. "This is our time." Had he been at the same tournament we were watching?

Frank's capacity for self-delusion is least alluringly deployed when he turns his thoughts to the infamous Ayia Napa video, in which an unnamed man films him, Rio Ferdinand and Kieron Dyer "romping" with two girls they have picked up in the resort before ordering them to perform a lesbian sex show. It subsequently found its way to the News of the World.

I have no idea whether Frank has seen this tape since it was made, but he would have done well to have forced himself through a viewing by way of background research. Its details were heavily sanitised to protect the News of the World's fabled reputation as a "family newspaper", but as someone who has seen the uncut version I find it fairly remarkable that he was able to simply dismiss the episode as "an error of judgment", and - as my colleague Martin Kelner noted on Monday - fail to offer any expression of regret for the humiliation caused to the girls involved.

Difficult to pick the most haunting excerpt, but the moment in which he admonishes a beer-bottle-wielding Kieron Dyer with the words "if you're going to do that, at least drink it first" certainly lingers. Unsurprisingly, the News of the World chose Lampard's ruminations on this business as their marquee serialisation extract, and his profiting from the revisiting of it is singularly distasteful.

http://www.theguardian.com/football/2006/aug/03/sport.comment3

[chand]

Fucking hell, the WWII stuff is hideous. I'm never as xenophobic towards the majority of my friends and half of my family as when I see England football fans reference the war. When they played Germany last time, the TV cameras showed pictures of fans in 1940s military fancy dress and I very nearly turned it off. In the end, I compromised on watching with the sound muted to stop any hysterial commentary/dodgy chants from giving me an aneurysm.

Last time I remember going to watch England in a pub surrounded by England fans was Euro 2004, England against France, the game where Gerrard did that backpass that went horribly wrong. Place was full of loudmouths doing dull 'In-ger-land' chants for the most part, interspersed with regular shouts of "FUCKING FRENCH CUNT!". My main memory of that experience though was that on a couple of occasions the dominant group of beered-up goons draped in England flags would embark on an impromptu rendition of "Two World Wars and one World Cup!", presumably to taunt German fans who weren't there anyway, even if we had been playing Germany, which we weren't. And I just remember it striking me as such a shit chant. Gloating over football matches is fine, gloating over wars in which millions of people on both sides died? Less so, I would say. The football half of the chant fails even harder, since a) it was the Euros, which we'd never won while Germany had won it three times and b) Germany had also won two World Cups since.

I think that was the moment I realised England fans were always going to be embarrassing to be around.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

I think given that the World War ended up basically bankrupting Britain and destroying it's empire while Germany became the model social democratic society and Europe's dominant economic and political power, Germans must feel pretty sorry for us over the "two world wars" stuff.

[BlodwynPig]

I really do hope that Rod Fanni makes the French team.

[doppelkorn]

I really do hope that Rod Fanni makes the French team.

They've all got...nope

They're all Rod...hang on.

They all rod fann....oh come on it's in there somewhere.

[biggytitbo]

Yes, I also wonder why they're taking Wayne Rooney, England's fifth top scorer of all time, second top scorer in the league this season, six goals in his last 11 games for England. I'm not exactly the dude's biggest fan but I don't think taking Wayne Rooney as one of the four strikers is among the more baffling decisions an England manager has made.

Its that kind of bullshit that leads to us been so poor in major tournaments the last decade. Rooney hasn't under performed since he was good in 2004, he's been so shockingly awful it looked like he'd been drugged before the match. Thats a decade where he has been way short of what is remotely acceptable at this level and yet he keeps getting picked again and again, worse still we make the team revolve around our worst player.  Its the definition of insanity, trying the same failed strategy 4 times in a row and expecting a different outcome.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

In fairness, at Euro 2012 he was suspended for the first two games so never really got into it. He was injured into the runup of 2010 wasn't he and rushed back? So it's really only 2006 where he's gone in fully prepared and been shite, but so was the whole team.

Meanwhile, he was the top scorer in qualifying with 7 goals. Insane to suggest he shouldn't go.

[biggytitbo]

In fairness, at Euro 2012 he was suspended for the first two games so never really got into it. He was injured into the runup of 2010 wasn't he and rushed back? So it's really only 2006 where he's gone in fully prepared and been shite, but so was the whole team.

Meanwhile, he was the top scorer in qualifying with 7 goals. Insane to suggest he shouldn't go.

There's  a big difference between qualifying and actually delivering at a major tournament. He hasn't scored a single goal in a tournament since he was 18. He's now 28.


And wasn't he injured in 2006 aswell? Isn't he injured again now? He's just not good enough and the fact we keep going back to these failures is why we're such serial failures as a team.

[thraxx]

Its that kind of bullshit that leads to us been so poor in major tournaments the last decade. Rooney hasn't under performed since he was good in 2004, he's been so shockingly awful it looked like he'd been drugged before the match. Thats a decade where he has been way short of what is remotely acceptable at this level and yet he keeps getting picked again and again, worse still we make the team revolve around our worst player.  Its the definition of insanity, trying the same failed strategy 4 times in a row and expecting a different outcome.

Who would you pick instead of Rooney?

Peter Crouch?  Darren Bent? Gary Hooper?  Or maybe Frazier Campbell?

[biggytitbo]

Who would you pick instead of Rooney?

Peter Crouch?  Darren Bent? Gary Hooper?  Or maybe Frazier Campbell?

Yeah Crouch. Anyone not tainted by such abject failure.

[the midnight watch baboon]

There's  a big difference between qualifying and actually delivering at a major tournament. He hasn't scored a single goal in a tournament since he was 18. He's now 28.

he did score a 30" screamer against the Ukraine in '12...

[doppelkorn]

A thirty inch screamer!

[George Oscar Bluth II]

Was a great finish to be fair.

[BlodwynPig]

Biggy is spot on with Rooney. Who to take in his place? I don't care, I don't follow football that closely.

;)