…I can tell you when I was at Tottenham, when full internationals came around, there were two or three players who did not want to play for England.
They would come to me 10 days before the game and say, ‘Gaffer, get me out of that game, I don’t want to play in that game’. That was how it was. I’d say, ‘you’re playing for your country, you should want to play’.
‘Nah, my girlfriend is having a baby in four weeks, I don’t want to play’ and that is the truth, so it makes you wonder.
And I think it’s only going to get worse. You see the stick the England players get and they come home, they’re earning fantastic money at their clubs, they’re all playing in the Champions League. They think, “Do we need the aggro?”‘
The softly spoken words of Arry Redschnapps, uncharacteristically opening his heart on a phone in, this time to BBC Radio Five Live’s Sportsweek programme.
Since that bombshell, England captain Steven Gerrard has challenged Arry to name names:
I tell you what, I’d be interested to find out who those players are. If Harry is making a comment like that, he should name them and embarrass them. No one in this group wants to go home.
Should Harry not name them? If he’s not naming them, I can’t answer that. If it’s the case, it’s disgusting. For me, if a player doesn’t want to be, he doesn’t deserve to be here at a World Cup.
The comment refers to ‘them’. ‘They’ didn’t want to play for England. Who? Name them? Is it Aaron Lennon, Kyle Walker, Andros Townsend? I don’t know who he means. Five years ago?
I’ve spoken to Jermain Defoe and he’s devastated [not to be in Brazil]. I can understand why you’ve asked the question, with Harry Redknapp a big coach in the game, but we need names.”
Roy Hodgson, predictably chose the path of reason in his response:
If you make comments like that, you have to name them. I could name a player with an educated guess, but players? It’s unfair to ask people to look back historically.”
What we have here are a number of issues.
The glaringly obvious one, is that if Arry is bitter that he didn’t get the England job, then he’s positively seething that nobody hired him as a World Cup pundit.
Who knows if he priced himself out of a gig, but his World Cup has consisted so far of phoning into Colin Murray’s show to waffle about England’s prospects for 3 or 4 minutes every morning in order to be introduced as, and bid farewell to, as 666Bet’s Ambassador.
Ouch.
The suggestion that players have been inclined to swerve meaningless international friendlies and other low grade fixtures isn’t one that will shock anyone.
I can’t recall an age such as this one, where “big time” footballers announce their international retirement, whilst still competing domestically. This isn’t retirement in the traditional sense of the word. These guys aren’t retiring at, they are “laughing off” future requests for them to play.
So if the players are pulling stunts like this, has Arry actually done anything wrong?
Well yes he has.
Because at a time when a healing process ought to slowly begin to be looked for, he is casually adding fuel to a fire lit by the neanderthals who believe that the “England problem” can be solved by simply sacking the manager, and/or playing Wazza in the middle, and not on the left.
The roots of the malaise are significantly deeper, as we discussed on the last blog.
In a brave need world, where the state resists the urge to sell playing fields, where the state decides to step in and instigate the glacial change that is required.
In the NHS, they estimate in order to affect the mean amongst the admissions that are essentially born from a cycle of ignorance (using deep fat fryer for most meals, harmful alcohol intake levels, smoking), it takes about 3 generations.
I didn’t use the word glacial by chance.
The good news, and there is a genuine glimmer of it, is that the inception of the Premier League, the FA and Sky, have only been destroying football since 1992.
The culture in modern football, isn’t as ingrained as eating deep fried food 3 times a day, then boozing and smoking tabs, just because your daddy did, your granddaddy did, and all their forefathers afore them.
Changing that sort of culture is tough. One of the reasons it is so tough, is that the health of the nation doesn’t make any money. That and governments tend to change at a rate the prohibits continuity and advancement.
So what was damaged in a little over 20 years, shouldn’t take 100 years to repair.
Gigantic anuses like Arry, aren’t conducive to putting things right.
