Title: Just found this on another board:
Thank goodness thats all over for another four years. Dont get me wrong, I wanted England to win the World Cup as much as the next man.
I even flew to Stuttgart for the game against Ecuador, which a woeful England fluked with a flash (perhaps the final flourish) of Beckham brilliance.
Englands captain was physically sick on the pitch. I knew how he felt. After the match the general consensus was that we were rubbish, an international embarrassment, stumbling into the last eight on the back of a deeply unimpressive victory over the worst team left in the tournament.
At Stuttgart airport I bumped into David Dein, the Arsenal vice-chairman and the man most instrumental in getting Sven Goran Eriksson the England managers job. Davids view was that the performance didnt matter, at least we won. I begged to differ.
Maybe its the hopeless romantic in me, but I subscribe to the footballing philosophy of the late Danny Blanchflower, the Northern Irish captain of the Tottenham Hotspur double-winning team.
The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. Its nothing of the kind. The game is about glory. Its about doing things in style, with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.
Precisely.
There was precious little glory on offer from England. Not a lot of style either, unless you count the expensive, designer threads on the backs of the WAGs, the gormless bunch of slappers who comprise Englands camp-followers.
The only flourish was the theatrical presentation of a red card to manchild Wayne Rooney, whose understandable frustration at the clueless tactics of his fraudulent head coach boiled over into petulance.
We can eulogise the spirited rear-guard action mounted by Englands remaining ten men against Portugal, but it was all too little, too late. My enduring image of the quarter-final was that of Beckham bawling his eyes out like a spoilt baby after being substituted. As Jeff Powell pointed out yesterday, Beckham cried for himself, not for his country.
It was the precursor of the full-scale sob-fest to come after the final whistle, as Englands amateurish inability to convert penalties consigned them to the departure lounge empty-handed, yet again.
What we saw in the shoot-out was a collective loss of nerve. Call it lack of spine, cowardice, a bottle job.
The players slumped to the floor, tears streaming down their cheeks, inconsolable. Only Gary Neville, the bloody-minded barrack-room lawyer, rose manfully above the metrosexual orgy of grief and strode the pitch shaking hands with the victorious Portuguese.
Frankly, this pageant of lachrymose self-pity made me thoroughly ashamed to be English. What would Blanchflowers generation make of this vapid bunch of extravagantly-rewarded nancy boys? Players from his era occasionally shed the odd tear. But they cried when they won, not when they lost.
Maybe we should have come to expect little better. Englands young footballers are the inevitable product of years of social conditioning, of feminised feel-your-pain drivel, of a culture which insists it is always better to have a good cry rather than stoically maintain a stiff upper lip. Thats how we ended up with an England football captain in a sarong.
And so we roll up the flags and put out the empties and a semblance of normality returns, at least up to the European Championships in two years time.
Until then we will mercifully be spared the fairweather fans who insist on calling the beautiful game footie; the dopey birds drinking lager from a bottle pretending they know the difference between a holding midfielder and a Gucci hold-all; and the loss of perspective which elevates the resignation of David Beckham above the deaths of two British soldiers on the Ten OClock News.
Its enough to make you weep.
