Mails: Football365’s famous World Cup 1998 ladder
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England ladder
The most depressing thing about reading the latest world cup ladder wasn’t the sight of Henderson at 3, although that really is concerning.
The most depressing thing is that having Phil Neville at no. 50 is probably about right, even now.
Will (is going to GLASTOOO!!!) Graham
The famous 1998 World Cup ladder
The recent resurgence in 90s football nostalgia, thanks to Planet Football (my time spent reading football stories has now doubled), it got me thinking, what would the ‘Famous World Cup Ladder’ have looked like in the month before the 1998 World Cup? (Personally the pinnacle of World Cups for me, too young for Italia 90). Compiling this list, the depth shows how England were once spoilt for choice. I have gone purely off – a rose tinted- memory and a quick look at the squad actually selected for the tournament. I’m sure there are more empirical ways of doing this:
1) Alan Shearer- England’s best forward. Glenn trusts him, we trust him. Captain Fantastic.
(See Harry Kane, 2017)
2) Tony Adams- Clean and sober leading a successful Arsenal team, will definitely lead the defence.
3) David Seaman- Undisputed number 1, relationship with Adams could be crucial.
4) Paul Ince- Experience and Hoddle’s faith in him, will see him anchor the midfield.
5) David Beckham- Seems to have ousted McManaman, will surely line up on the right.
6) Sol Campbell- Colossus for Spurs, will feature in a back 3 with Adams. If he moved to a club more befitting his stature he would be a world beater.
7) Darren Anderton- Useful, like a can-opener.
8) Teddy Sheringham- The Noel to Shearer’s Liam. Will surely partner the main man up front.
9) Paul Scholes- The Man U man has surged into the top 10. It would help if he learnt how to tackle.
10) Gary Neville- Has pushed his brother out of the reckoning. Why was Phil in the Euro 96 squad?
11) Graham Le Saux- Nigel Winterburn? Alan Wright? Andy Hinchcliffe? Didn’t think so.
12) Michael Owen- Raw, fast, exciting, will Hoddle use him?
13) David Batty- Sure to wind a few teams up. A nuisance for opposition number 10s. Will surely be given the chance to get stuck in.
14) Steve McManaman- Skilful, energetic, but not as reliable as Anderton.
15) Nigel Martyn- Number 2. Apparently, milk is his 2nd favourite drink according to ‘Match’ magazine. Kind of sums up his place in the squad.
16) Gareth Southgate- A dependable back up.
17) Les Ferdinand- Will only see action if Shearer is unavailable.
18) Martin Keown- See above, but replace Shearer with Adams.
19) Rob Lee- Stylish, talented, we’re surprised a player who resembles the manager’s playing style is so seldom used.
20) Tim Flowers- Number 3.
21) Paul Merson- Glenn likes him, not sure exactly why. Looks good in the Championship mind.
22) Paul Gascoigne- Go on Glenn, you know it makes sense.
23) Robbie Fowler- Has his time come and passed? Like a man going through a mid-life crisis, we now have a younger, faster, fitter model.
24) Rio Ferdinand- He shows promise. Will only travel to quietly watch on the sidelines.
25) Andy Cole- Would help if he took his first chance to score and not the fifth.
26) Dion Dublin- Has scored more goals than Dennis Bergkamp in the Premier League this season, let that sink in.
27) Chris Sutton- Despite being the main man for Rovers, he’s still in Alan’s shadow.
28) David Platt- Ever dependable, loyal servant. Has experience, but has been overtaken by younger, more agile versions.
29) Dennis Wise- Would be fun to watch, but please don’t do it to us.
30) Matt le Tissier- Again, would be great to watch, but never going to happen. Shame.
31) Ray Parlour- Stellar season so far. Unlucky, but will ultimately miss out. Should consider getting a haircut.
32) Nick Barmby- Useful like a can-opener. However, not as sharp as our other can-opener.
33) Jamie Redknapp- If he could stay fit, he’d be on the plane.
34) Ian Walker- A reliable fourth choice.
35) Nicky Butt- His time will come.
36) Ugo Ehiogu- Shows the depth we have at the back.
37) Mark Wright- Had his chance, but better centre halves have emerged.
38) Steve Howey- Ibid.
39) Stan Collymore- Not worth the risk.
40) Rob Jones- Why do you keep breaking our hearts?
41) Gary Pallister- Less trusted at club level, no trust from Glenn.
42) David James- Lucky we have depth in this position. Don’t let him near the posts in an England jersey. Ever.
43) Lee Dixon- Well down the pecking order.
44) Neil Redfearn- Great season, plenty of goals, could lay off the pies.
45) Warren Barton- Part of Newcastle’s defence. Enough said.
46) Ian Wright- Sadly for Wrighty his time has passed. Will always have THAT hat-trick though.
47) Lee Hendrie- Bright future ahead for this young man.
48) Stuart Pearce- No amount of blood, sweat or tears can defeat Father Time. We miss him.
49) Tim Sherwood- Better than Zidane they say, still won’t make the squad.
50) Phil Neville.
Sam- Stuck in the 90s
English players abroad
I’m going to Join the debate regarding English/British players moving abroad as I agree with Paul’s email from yesterday and have felt for a while that the lack of English players moving abroad is one reason we always struggle during international tournaments.
The sad truth is that the vast majority of our players are only used to the football which is played in our own domestic league and during tournaments we just seem to buckle at the first sight of anything out of the ordinary. So I think it is right to question why such a nominal number of our players take a leap into the unknown and move to foreign leagues.
I very much agree with Rob’s points from this morning but I also think that a big part of it is that many foreign clubs are put off by the massive price tags that we place on our own ‘home grown’ players. Just consider the mark up in price placed on English players that our own domestic clubs willingly pay within the Premier League. We pay a massive premium in order to buy an English player and I’m sure that it will be blatantly obvious to foreign clubs. Juts to pick one example and without purposefully picking on John Stones, who in Europe would have paid £47.5m (or whatever figure it was) for Stones when you can get say someone like Umtiti for half that? I’m sorry, but it’s just batsh!t mental. Not only that, now take the perspective of a British club selling their British player. Why would they choose to even try and sell abroad when they can most probably get 150% of the players true value purely by selling domestically. Unfortunately money speaks at the end of the day and the Premier League is f**king stuffed full of the stuff.
Finally, as has been (quite rightly) suggested that British managers are now struggling to break into the upper echelons of the Premier League due to ‘higher quality’ foreign imports, I feel we are starting to drift this way with players also. There is far more competition within Premier League squads for home grown players to thrive, and gradually our international team is being forced to pick from an ever diminishing talent pool from within our own top flight domestic league. Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely great for the Premier League, I mean who wouldn’t want to see the likes of Pogba, Hazard, Aguero, Zlatan, Sanchez et al week in week out? I know I do. However, the sad consequence is that it’s most probably become detrimental to the quality of our national team. So, swings and roundabouts I guess.
Al Williams
I’ve not been completely up to date with the mailbox in the last few days so I think I missed ground zero on this, but why is there a need to encourage more attacking play? I don’t really understand why we are constantly looking at how to improve the game like this – does anyone actually enjoy football as it is? I think we’ve got a pretty good game already, and I enjoy it as it is. Whilst I appreciate that some teams park the bus, most of the top teams today still get get to the top by having outstanding attacks. It seems weird that this is cropping up after the season we’ve just had, in which Monaco scored over 150 goals this year, Barcelona and Madrid each surpassed 100 league goals again, Spurs, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea all surpassed 100 goals in all comps. I appreciate these are extremely selective examples, but I don’t think football is stuck in some defensive humdrum that requires changes to the rules.
Speaking mostly for the Premier League, I’m not sure the reason a lot of the teams outside the top 7 is because they set up to park the bus and have no intention to attack (although naturally they tend to be more inclined to defend against the top 7), it’s just that alot of teams in the league have an absolute dearth of quality in the final third (although I look forward to stats proving me completely wrong). Maybe it is to do with the managers the clubs hire, who understand how to coach a defense but aren’t sure how to get the best out of their attackers. I don’t know, but I do know that there is not some sort of bus-parking pandemic. Some teams do it, some by lack of quality rather than by design, lots don’t. I feel like it wasn’t long ago that there were cries of some sort of national decline in the standard of defending.
A final point, and I appreciate I’m late to the party on this but it was on my mind, re the reason print jounalists are not held in high regard, is that I think alot of the chief writers, particularly for the red tops, don’t analyse football matches very well. I’m not saying they don’t know anything about football, but their content (gathered from Mediawatch and the occassional article) tends to be based on transfers (based on who you know) and issues within the game (refereeing decisions, diving, cheating, winter break, foreign managers, video technology etc). I don’t read alot of their stuff, granted, but listening to them on Sunday Supplement every week, they are completely unable to explain, in terms of tactics, anything that happens in a football match. They use vague wording (“they wanted it more”, “they had more quality”, “they overpowered them”) which says nothing about why these things happened, and does nothing to separate them from the guy down the pub. They are a classic example of who you know, not what you know. That guy being called out on it over the Rashford free-kick by Ray Wilkins was a great listen, even if Wilkins is a bit of a plum himself.
Martin, Brighton
Ah, the good old “island mentality / they’ll miss fish & chips too much” response to the question of why English player don’t move abroad. Classic, go-to and very lazy.
Firstly, lots of English players DO move abroad. The problem is they’re usually ones few of us have heard of or have forgotten about. Off the top of my head, Jay Bothroyd plays in Japan, Luke Steele is the current Panathinaikos keeper and Matt Derbyshire is playing in Cyprus. There are countless more that can be found with a simple Google search. They can’t all be exceptions to the rule so the whole generalisation of the ‘Little Englander’ when it comes to football is demonstrably not true.
Most will then say why don’t the top English players do the same? The answer is the same reason a lot of foreign players come here – the money on offer is rather good. It’s fair to say only Bayern, Barcelona, Real Madrid or PSG could match the sort of wages on offer in the Premier League to the best English players and are any of those clubs queueing up for their signature? Probably not, so their option if they want to go abroad is to do so for a lot less money. Hardly surprising most choose to stay.
Matt, Chichester
I sent the mail below in 2013, when the subject of English players moving abroad raised its ugly head then. Unfortunately, no one gave me an answer then so hopefully someone could now.
Many people are asking why young, English players aren’t plying their trade abroad as so many foreign players do here. But if these foreign players are flocking here to learn their trade, and learn it so good that our domestic sides can’t get enough of them, surely we are doing something right and maybe young, English players are where they should be?
Just a thought ’till the real football starts again.
Andy Race
Give English players some credit
Is it self-flagellation time again? Sweet. A bout of illness has left me feeling particularly sorry for myself, so it’s come at the ideal time. Rob’s mail touched on that classic theme: English players staying home because of “small-minded little Englishness”. That extension of our general national self-loathing, borne of the desire to distance ourselves from the stereotypical Englishman: a beetroot head atop a naked chest, Union flag shorts, Stella breath, boorishly abusing a Spanish waiter and pissing on the local monument. Don’t we just loathe the British working class? Oh hang on, that’s not fair. It’s not the British, it’s the English. The Scottish travelling support is wonderful, the Irish lads just out for the craic, whereas our mob are there for the chair-throwing Olympics and to cause an international incident.
Can we stop with this bulls**t? This idea that continental players are erudite, multilingual bastions of society, whereas the English equivalent is unable to eat a kebab without juddering out some incorrectly-pronounced bigotry? Why do English players stay in England? Because it’s where they earn the most. Why do overseas players come to England. Because they are itching with wanderlust and a true desire to experience the cultural delights of England. Sorry, mis-typed. I meant to say, “because it’s where they earn the most”. For every player making career choices that are designed to maximise his playing achievements, there are a hundred who just want to get paid. Most footballers know they aren’t world-beaters. They aren’t going to win the Balon D’or, they aren’t going to win trophies, and they aren’t going down in history as one of the greats. They are just average professional footballers. Look around your workplace; you probably have people around you that you know will go far. But most of them are just there to get paid. Is that bad? Are they ignorant p***ks, little Englanders, lazy arseholes? Because they could go and work overseas too. They might get a bigger workload, and that’s what we’re all striving for, right?
I find this attitude distasteful as it is simply an extension of the anti-working class sentiment that pervades modern British society. We are being taught to sneer at the poor, by those who keep them in poverty. I’m f**king tired of being told that English people are s**t. If that’s all you see, where the f**k are you looking? Who the f**k are you talking to? No overseas player rocked up in Newcastle because he grew up dreaming of the misty Tyne. The Ajax captain hasn’t gone to Everton because his nights were filled with cooing visions of a temptress Liver bird.
Players move for playing time because they need a contract. Let’s not romanticise it. Bellerin didn’t leave Barcelona because he just desperately wanted to spend time playing the game he loves. He wanted to get paid more money. That is the real world. Insulting the intelligence of English footballers is unnecessary and unfair, and reeks of the modern distancing from the working-class that is so pervasive and f**king disgusting. Demonise the poor to make it easier to persecute them. Make them the enemy. They’re robbing you, don’t you know that? They take all that benefit money and have massive TVs. It’s always the massive f**king TVs (no, not RuPaul). Thing is, that massive TV probably cost £300, split into 1000 convenient weekly payments of £8. It’s really not a lot, but we’ve decided they don’t even deserve that. Because men earning large salaries yet STILL steal from the public purse want you to hate those awful poor people. Meanwhile, my town will tonight be filled with cars that cost more than houses, paid by great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s wonderfully prescient investment in slave-trading.
But please, by all means keep on blaming the working class for their own ignorance. Blame them for being driven out of the mainstream at an early age by an education system that doesn’t want to actively engage them, by a nation that doesn’t want to see them, and by a media that wants us all to f**king lynch them. The elite have decided we don’t need them anyway, and why shouldn’t we trust people who regard being poor as your f**king problem? It’s not as though they’ll move onto us, right? We’re f**king great. We go on weekend city breaks and say grazie. We’re just like the elite, aren’t we? They want us, right?
Murdoch told you the poor wanted it that way, that they choose that miserable futureless life. That the alcohol, drug, and mental issues that swarm sink estates are just because of bad life choices, the levels of crime because these people are inherently criminal. And you f**king choked that s**t down. Go to Kensington today. Look at the f**king disparity. And what happens when one of these working class scumbags has the audacity to earn a bit of money, to buy a flash car? Those same newspapers turn on them once more, equating them with drug dealers and criminals. They’ll accept Russian billionaires and their stolen wealth, they’ll happily party without a concern for Philip Green’s immoral theft from the poor (because they aren’t even people), and they are more than happy to ignore the endless human rights abuses by Arab princes on a daily basis. But how f**king dare you be a poor kid from Peckham who buys himself a Ferrari. You’re a disgrace, flaunting your wealth, shaming the nation and being totally undeserving of that £80k a week. Meanwhile, the guy who owns that newspaper makes more money every f**king day.
This got quite far from the original point, but I stand by every bloody word. We have allowed the media and government to enforce hatred on the bottom end of our society, while ignoring the massed billionaires who have asset-stripped the nation. I’m f**king tired of it. And if we’re being honest, most continental footballers speak English because they learned it at a young age. It would be lovely if that occurred here. Well, it actually does. In the kind of schools that a working class kid will never go to, because they don’t want the poor to be educated. Education is terrifying to the elite, because people might actually realise what a bunch of c**ts they are. Meanwhile the middle-classes play the role of the freed slave in Roman times; fawning up, and spitting down.
But yeah, you keep on blaming the ignorance of the uneducated. It’s all their own fault, right? Lazy c**ts.
thayden
Parking buses
People who have been writing in suggesting rule changes to stop “parking the bus” are missing one thing: Football is an entertaining sport not because of the goals but because of the suspense and how you’re emotionally involved right to the end – at least to me.
Three of my favorite football games which I never tire of watching are Chelsea 1-1 Barcelona (2009), Barcelona 1-0 Inter Milan (2010) and Barcelona 2-2 Chelsea (2012). You know what these games have in common? Determined attacking play vs determined bus-parking. It was really fun to be on the edge of my seat seeing whether the defending team can hang on or the attacking team can snatch it at the death. (Andres Iniesta, I’m looking at you)
I watched that 2012 Champions League semi-finals together with some Chelsea- and Barcelona-supporting friends of mine. At 85 mins, we all agreed that both teams have given their best and whoever made it through deserves it. We were really entertained!
To put it another way, I watched Chelsea put four past Man Utd and five past Everton this past season. Yet, I’d rather see the highlights of those games than watch them again from minute 1 – 90. However, I don’t watch those three games on highlights. Everytime I do, it’s from beginning to the end.
And didn’t Man City 1-1 Liverpool (2017) teach us that two attacking teams with defensive abandon do not necessarily produce an avalanche of goals? Now I’m not bashing that game, I enjoyed watching it too because anything could have happened right to the very end.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I like watching football. I don’t want to see a team use the other for shooting practise as Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich seem to do every week and the game’s over by 60 mins. No, I want both teams to fight it out and keep me interested until the final second. (Iniesta again!)
Franklin, CFC, Lagos
Missing buses
I missed the bus this morning, and started a mail about how I think Liverpool should look into a double signing of Andrew Robertson and Harry Maguire from Hull.
Robertson is a young, solid LB we sorely need, and I was impressed by Maguire in the 2nd half of last season. It makes sense, especially as both know each other and have played together.
Then I saw that Leicester have signed Maguire for £17 Million. Bugger.
Missed the bus in more ways than one, it seems..
Lee (Can’t Klopp and Sakho just hug it out?), LFC
The battle of opinions continues
Town Planner Tom, I find it strange that you are happy to call my response ‘finger pointing and patronising’ yet both of your mails are exactly that – trying to find the cause of such a poor footballing season (we can go round and round and round over the final appearance and 8th position (closer to 17th than 7th but that’s a whole different conversation..)) by apportioning blame to surrounding factors. The bottom line is that it is the sole purpose of the Manager to counter all of your arguments:
Losing players and not making up the difference – something we are so used to, yet many past managers have coped admirably well.
When we lost Fonte and subsequently VvD got injured Puel didn’t even look at a replacement for either! To go on through the remainder of the season knowing that your central defensive partnership is made up of, in effect, your back up, is just plain wrong.
Finally we agree – Forster has had a shocking season – if you and I can see this how come the Manager didn’t even give him a rest? Granted the backup may not be on same level, but potentially the realisation of being dropped may have given him the necessary kick up the well paid arse?
Toothless in attack – correct, mainly due to the managers ridiculous notion of changing players in positions every game – his squad rotation is well documented.
The negative atmosphere at SMS has come on over the whole season – I’m sure there are a ‘happy clapping’ bunch of people just like you cheering every minute of useless possession, if that’s what flicks your switch then you were rewarded, for us that want the club to play the positive attacking football for which we have found works clearly there clearly wasn’t reward, just a slow painful realisation that we were trying not to concede, at the detriment of not scoring.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I respect yours, but ultimately the Board have also agreed with the majority. Puel may well have had pedigree, unfortunately for him his style suited neither the club or the league and he refused to change.
IK (COYR)
Suggested reading
The suggested reading in today’s mediawatch and morning mailbox was class
Wadamba
The opposite of suggested reading
Has this been covered before?
Steve Bruce wrote 3 murder-mystery novels in the late 90s – Sweeper, Striker and Defender.
They are sh*t.
Alex Stokoe
Newcastle upon Tyne.