Flaggots

Warning: this post contains an unhealthy amount of metaphors.

It's difficult being English. I sat down today and watched the film Eurotrip for the first time. Like every other comedy I've been meaning to see, it was absolutely awful (when a comedy fails to make you laugh or give a monkeys what happens to the main characters you know you're in trouble). But, it did highlight a good ol' English trait: 'soccer hooligans'.

In the film, two American teens travelling from America wind up with a rag-tag bunch of East London thugs who, of course, like everyone else from England, support their local team Manchester United. The gang, led - in an Oscar worthy performance...- by Vinnie Jones, tear round Europe callously punching Frenchmen and even assaulting the Papal escorts in the Vatican City (yep, this film really is terrible).

So it explains how the rest of the world sees us. A bunch of beer-fuelled louts who are incredibly passionate about football, so much so that we're ready to assault random strangers in the name of a victory.

So what a fucking disgrace it is, to see 11 Englishman tip-toe off the pitch in Bloemfontein after being outclassed, outgunned, and out-committed by a battle-hardened set of Germans.

There's no point in analysing what went wrong. There's no point pondering why Lampard and Gerrard still refuse to work together as though they are water and electricity respectively. There's no point discussing if Fabio Capello wasn't to wear 3D glasses to every England game, maybe he'd realise they were shit and not 'geeveeng a guud pairformence'.

The fact of the matter is we were terrible from day one. 'Oooooh we played well in the qualifiers' cried most people, giving their reasons why England might win the tournament. Unfortunately, these very naïve, mentally retarded people forgot that we played Kazakhstan and Andorra, two nations who probably have more dodos in their country than proper footballers.

Then Capello decided he would pick his team based on form rather than general class. You forget the wise old proverb - like many such proverbs, probably originated from a Marvel comic somewhere - 'Form is temporary, class is permanent'. Take for example, two of the goalscorers from German team. Miroslav Klose has scored three times in the last Bundesliga season, yet has scored just one shy of that total on the big stage in South Africa. Same with Lukas Podolski, who has netted the same number of goals all season for FC Köln. So here we are, getting spanked by a team made up of 'out of form' players. Players, whom had Capello been managing, probably would have been left at home to tend to their frankfurter farms (surely one exists SOMEWHERE).

But oh no! Capello was not to pick from class, as he decided to bring Emile Heskey, who is just about as useful as a hitchhiker with no thumbs. Or a vampire who lives in a curtain-less house. Or Scooby Doo without Velma. The only reason we took Emile Heskey was to show the poor South African children who live on the outskirts of District 9 (it is real, honest) that 'hey, life could be worse'. The wise ol' prophet Alan Shearer has always maintained that 'Heskey makes players around him play better'. Correction. Emile Heskey is SO BAD, he makes the players around him LOOK better. Hell, he could happily slot into the Dog and Duck FC and make the 40-year old striker with a pacemaker and a wooden leg look like Pele.

But, lets not shoot the largest target. It's easy to blame Capello. This is the man after all, who has won everything wherever he has been. Unfortunately as England manager, he has been lumped with a team of individuals who get bigger stage fright than a 6-year old child playing Joseph at the Christmas nativity play. Bar David James and Ashley Cole, the 21 other England players have been nothing short of diabolical. These (as one woman from Essex described them) ''undred faasend paand supastarz' have been quite simply, outplayed. Whether it was by the Americans, who were confused by the concept of a ball game played with the feet; the Algerians, who now have to go back home and sell camels to make ends meet; or the Slovenians, who are still fighting some kind of race war with men with names like Milsoveic.

And to top England's big pile of shit of with a sparkler you see in a tacky cocktail, there are the idiots at home who go St. George crazy, or as I like to call them, Flaggots. These are the people that, would it not be health hazardous when eating their half-time kebab, would paint red crosses on their teeth. Houses adorned with tacky red paint, flags attached to cars like they are ambassadors on foreign soil. Don't get me wrong, there's being patriotic and that, but when it's so obvious we're terrible, the jingoistic attitude displayed by many mentally inept England fans was a little bit embarrassing. It's like turning up to a swimming gala with the tightest Speedos and the most orange goggles, and then getting beat in the breastroke by a man with one leg who got the bus to the pool. We shouted, we painted and we believed. All we did was waste our breath, paint and mental activity.

So there we are, why it's difficult to be English. Because when the chips are down, we only ever have ourselves to blame. Oh and maybe Sepp Blatter, whose refusal to adopt goaline technology is frighteningly similar to when my granddad thought adopting the internet in his home would be like letting Satan into his front door. Now the old man never leaves eBay. Call me a traitor, but I just didn't care about this World Cup as much as I did before. I tried to hope. But the thing was, I just didn't believe. And that's probably what the 11 players who walked out to face the Germans today thought. It would explain why they played like a team of Stevie Wonder's...