England roadshow is taking fans for a ride

Mick Dennis13 April 2012

England fans who arrived early for the match against Greece were free to wander around the Manchester United museum. Well, not free exactly. It cost £5.50 a head.

There was no charge to enter the massive club shop, though, and if you signed up there and then for a Manchester United credit card, they gave you a free football.

Nothing else was free. Everywhere you looked you were struck by how slick the United merchandising machine has become and struck even more painfully by this thought: we must have a national stadium for football internationals.

Old Trafford is a fine ground. It's getting a bit shabby, grubby and worn in places, yet it is undeniably a fine ground.

But it is Manchester United's ground, with their colours, their badge and their products everywhere. It is not the right place to stage an England international.

Those in the crowd on Saturday who were not Manchester United fans (which must have been most of us, because we made much more noise than is usual at Old Trafford) did not want to give money to United for parking the car or when we bought a coffee in Sevens (the snackbar named after the number of title wins Fergie has managed).

They've got more than enough money. That's why we loathe them.

And that's why, although the notion of taking England matches around the country has a superficial appeal, it cannot be right. Each club stadium in the land is just that, a club ground, too closely associated with partisanship and old enmities.

What's more, club stadiums are not big enough for England. Old Trafford only holds 68,000 and the FA could have sold 90,000 tickets to see Beckham and Co take on Greece.

So can we please get on with building a new, national stadium? It should be at Wembley, but I'd even settle for Birmingham if need be, so long as it is built somewhere.

That will surprise those charming Brummies who took part in a radio phone-in on Friday night, which was broadcast simultaneously by BBC local stations in London and Birmingham.

I was one of the token Londoners dragged in, and one Midlands chap described me as arrogant and patronising.

That may have been because I said that when they recorded that song, Football's Coming Home, I don't think they meant home to Solihull.

However, the truth is that although it is proposed to stick it in greenbelt land and they don't have planning permission, you can make out a reasonably convincing case for putting the national stadium in Birmingham.

There is a much better case for Wembley, in my view, but the important thing is to get the blinking thing built somewhere.

There is a reluctance on the part of this Government to back the project at all and, as someone who walked on the wobbly Millennium Bridge (with considerable difficulty and extreme care) on the first and only day it was opened, I understand that they don't want another embarrassing blunder.

That was part of the reason for cancelling the athletics stadium at Picketts Lock, I'm sure, and I have no quibble with that. In fact, it would surely have been wrong to commit Lottery cash to a stadium which would only have been filled for the World Championships when we've got perfectly good athletics stadiums elsewhere.

But we don't have a big enough, neutral football stadium and we need one, urgently.

Roary's pals are so tame

They are the official mascots of the England team, as in three lions (geddit?).

Great. Except they don't look at all like lions, and they have to have their tails tied up behind their heads to stop them dragging along the floor and tripping each other up.

As a service to readers, I visited the Football Association website to find out more about these blue monstrosities and discovered their names. They are called Roary, Mayne and Pauz.

As an additional service to readers, I made use of the website facility to email the three Smurf impersonators to tell them what a waste of space they are.

How we've emerged from the dark for a fjord fiesta

The list of "comments they wish they hadn't made" was not comprehensive, however. For some reason it did not include what Terry Venables wrote in the News of the World last November.

He said: "England have made a mistake in naming Sven-Goran Eriksson as England boss. It could lead to the end of international football as we know it. I just think it's wrong that he should have been appointed. For me it's a straightforward situation. International football for us should be 11 Englishmen against, for example, the best 11 Scots there are ... and coached by a fellow-countryman."

It's a good job for Tel that the Australians did not have such a narrow perception of international sport when they gave him a job as their manager.

We have to own up as well. This newspaper's chief football correspondent, Michael Hart, thought that appointing Eriksson was a betrayal of our heritage.

In our sister paper, the Daily Mail, Jeff Powell was the most vitriolic of all the critics. Jeff thought the job should have gone to his mate Venables and said: "We've sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness."

He also posed a couple of questions. He asked: "In their trendy eagerness to appoint a designer foreigner did none of the Lancaster Gate Seven pause for so long as a moment to consider the depth of this insult to our national pride?

"As they preened themselves over yesterday's installation of Sven-Goran Eriksson, did they begin to realise how gleefully the rest of the world would be laughing at us?"

And Jeff reasoned (if that is the word): "Not one of the recognised powers of world football is managed by a foreigner. Not Brazil, not France, not Argentina, not Italy, not Germany, not Holland, not Spain. Nor, come to that, Portugal, Romania, the Czech Republic, Russia, Belgium or - wait for it Messrs Eriksson and Crozier Sweden or Scotland."

Well, 11 months on, Brazil might not qualify for the World Cup finals. German might not either. Holland definitely won't - they were eliminated by the Republic of Ireland, a country not afraid to appoint a foreigner - and Scotland definitely won't. The Scots say they are ready to look abroad for a manager. Perhaps Venables will apply.

Sven-Goran's predecessor, Kevin Keegan, was the quintessential Englishman; the personification of all the sad failings of English football. He believed it was enough to invoke patriotism and jingoism; to wear three lions on your chest and your heart on your sleeve. It wasn't, and what greater insult to our national pride could there be than the way Keegan's men played against Romania in Euro 2000 or stumbled to abject defeat against Germany at Wembley a year ago?

So it is time to say thank-you to the land of hammer throwers and skiers. They may spend half their lives in darkness, but one of their chaps has shown us the light.

It's also time to recognise the debt we owe to Adam Crozier and David Dein, the two men most responsible for Eriksson's appointment.

As Arsenal vice-chairman, Dein knew that appointing a foreign manager would bring an entirely new approach to football. As a student of the European game, he knew of Eriksson's philosophy.

But it was Crozier, a Scotsman, who took the biggest gamble by going for a foreign manager. If it had all gone pear-shaped, it is difficult to see how Crozier could have survived. Crozier has messed up a couple of things but the most important decision he has had to make was the appointment of the England manager. And he got that right.

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