To mark England’s exit from the 2010 World Cup, here are some hints for the manager (it really doesn’t seem to matter who manages England or what language they speak as the England team never seems to live up to the nation’s expectations)…

1.  Never make a player play out of position.  They play all season long in one particular position for their clubs, get selected for the England squad for their exceptional club performance and then the England manager asks them to play in a different position.  Its asking for trouble – the player ends up drifting back across the field to his usual club position and leaves a huge gap which the opposing team exploit.  So don’t play Gerrard on the left wing and don’t play Terry at right back.

2.  Only playing players in their club positions instantly solves the “can Gerrard & Lampard play in the same team” debate.  They both play in the same position for their clubs and score lots of goals by picking the ball up just outside the penalty area.  As Gerrard is the team captain, the manager should be brave enough to leave Lampard on the sub’s bench.

3.  Choose a naturally left-footed player to play on the left wing.  Even if this means selecting a player who is not quite world-class.  At least they will stay in position out on the left wing, be able to link up with Ashley Cole, and put crosses into the box rather than cutting inside each time as right-footed players who play on the left wing tend to.  Then the team will not be wholly reliant on crosses from the right wing (whether from Beckham in prior years or from Milner currently).

4.  Players who call themselves “Strikers” are supposed to score goals, frequently.  Rooney has not scored for England in eight consecutive games and, whilst he is clearly a superb player for Man Utd, he seems to lose his mojo every time he dons an England shirt.  The manager should be brave enough to leave Rooney on the sub’s bench until he finds his England-goal-scoring-mojo again or, better still, send him on a Walkabout to go and find his mojo.

5.  Only playing strikers who score goals frequently would also rule out Heskey.  I am afraid that in a one-on-one situation (Heskey vs the goalkeeper), my money would be on the goalkeeper every time.

6.  So play Crouch up front because he has an admirable goal scoring record for England, provides a target for the long ball and can hold onto the ball whilst waiting for support.  So what if Franz Beckenbauer accuses England of playing Kick-and-Rush football - Klose scored for Germany in their 4-1 rout of England with one touch from a goal kick, the epitome of Route 1 football.

The result of only playing  players in their club positions would be an England team which plays 4-4-2 (with a diamond-shaped midfield formation) and looks roughly as follows:

Goalkeeper – James or Green.

Left back – Ashley Cole

Left centre-half – John Terry

Right centre-half – Rio Ferdinand

Right back – Glen Johnson

Holding midfield – Gareth Barry

Left wing – A naturally left-footed winger, e.g. Matthew Etherington

Central midfield – Stephen Gerrard

Right wing – James Milner or Shaun Wright-Phillips

Strikers – Peter Crouch and Jermain Defoe.

To those who say 4-4-2 is a tired formation then simply re-brand the diamond-shaped midfield as a 4-1-3-2 or even a 4-1-2-1-2 formation!

To finish my quadriennial football blogpost I am re-printing an article originally written to a fanzine by a Sheffield United supporter; it may contain plenty of very strong language but it is the funniest article I have ever seen about English football.

“Sir,  I’m feeling all angry about these modern day footballers, I know why they have gone all soft – It’s because of poncy names. That’s what it is. Remember in the old days, when football players kicked a brown ball made out of ten pound of clay stitched inside a steel-reinforced leather shell which was laced up with piano wire?

Well, in them days players could only survive the rigors of the game because they were called things like Albert, Arthur, Bert, Harry, Bill, Eddie, Bob, Jack and Tommy. Fucking tough names for tough men, them were. And what do we have now? Jason, Wayne, Dean, Ryan, Jamie, Robbie. Fucking tarts’ names, they are. Great big fucking puffs.

No wonder the ball’s like a fucking balloon and shin pads is like slices of bread. In the old days you never saw a Len Shackleton or a Billy Wright with a puffy little Sondico piece of paper down his little thin socks. Fucking shin pads in them days was made out of library books, and socks was like sackcloth.

Same with the jerseys. Fucking shirts with holes in now so they can breathe. Yes, so that little Jody’s hairless chest can breathe and he doesn’t get a chill. Fuck off. Stanley Matthews used to dribble round Europe’s finest wearing a fucking tent and shorts cobbled together from the jacket of his de-mob suit. Aye, he fucking did.

No wonder players fall over all the time whenever an opponent comes anywhere near them. And they never used to show their arses at one another either. Can you imagine what might have happened if Don Revie had flashed his ring at Nat Lofthouse during a City-Bolton Wanderers game? He’d have got one of them size 10 hobnail fuckers up his bastard chuff.

Fucking therapy for stress my arse! Stan Collymore slaps his missus about and he takes three seasons off with stress counseling. What the fuck is that all about? In the old days it was expected for footballers to belt the old sow about a bit, specially after a bad defeat. And the women used to expect it, and so they should have. They were lucky to be married to footballers.

Ha! Trevor Morley got a kitchen knife in his back off his wife and was out of action for three month. Soft twat. Archie McShitt of Port Vale got run over with horse and cart one Friday night and he still turned out against Bradford the following day. And he scored two goals. That’s cos his name wasn’t “Trevor”. Good old Archie. Broke his hip, both his legs, murdered his wife and buried her under the patio and still made the England team for the Home Internationals. Did he have any “stress counselling”? Did he bollocks!

And drugs? There was none of that in the old days. Oh, no. In them days it was a quick shot of morphine before kick-off and you were lucky if you got that. By half time it had all but wore off so they pumped you full of laudanum. None of this cocaine sniffing and shooting up class A narcotics.

Goal celebrations? Don’t talk to me about goal celebrations. Crawling on the floor and thrusting their hips at the crowd. Huh! I’d like to have seen Cliff Bastin do that after a run down the left flank and crossing for Alex James to fire home a winner. Handshakes…and that was all you got. That and a wank in the showers afterwards. But it was a proper wank…all man stuff. None of these puffy wanks between blokes that you get nowadays with players like Greame Le Saux and Stephen Gerrard, allegedly.

In them days, there was nowt wrong with it cos it didn’t mean nowt. They used to say there was a “gay atmosphere” in the dressing room after the match. But it didn’t mean owt mucky. Just a bit of harmless spanking the plank among healthy young sportsmen. Aye. I know. Me dad told me.

Sixty grand a fucking week! Ha! I wouldn’t pay ‘em tuppence. Two bob Tommy Lawton used to get…a month! And Tom Finney still worked as a plumber four days a week when he was playing for England. It’s true, you know. Fucking is. Players had to work them days just to make up their money. Not like today. Stan Pearson had to clean sewers and doubled up as Old Trafford shithouse cleaner. He had to go off during one game because someone had built a log cabin and blocked the U-bend. And that Eddie Hapgood was a male model…though he never liked to talk about it.

So I say we start calling kids real male names again. If you’re having a kid, don’t even consider puffy names and shite names like what people call their kids these days. Otherwise what we gonna get in twenty years’ time? The England team full of players called Keanu, Ronan, Ashley and fucking Chesney. Fuck that! Call your kids Alf, Herbert, Len, Frank, Fred and Wilf. And then just maybe England will stand a chance of winning the World Cup again.

I thank you.”

Is there really such a thing as a global market in talent for top executives?

Whilst compensation consultancies (wonderfully dubbed “Ratchet, Ratchet & Bingo” by Warren Buffet) would have us believe that such a market exists for talented individuals and therefore Boards of Directors should benchmark their executive’s pay against global peers (strangely those “global” peers only include highly paid Western managers and not the Salarymen of Japan, nevermind the poorly paid managers in Third World countries), it seems hard to comprehend that most executives would uproot their families (and pull settled children out of schools) and move to another country.  There is also the risk from the employer’s point of view that the new foreign hire will not seamlessly blend into their new company’s culture and mix easily with the existing staff.

It is probably true that newly qualified MBA students are the most willing jobseekers to look globally for a position, but managers who have been in situ for a while are likely to have put down roots in their local communities and would be killed by their spouses for even suggesting moving their 2.2 kids and the family dog to e.g. Singapore.  As a nation, the Dutch seem to have managers who make a success of it abroad (e.g. Marc Bolland of MKS and previously MRW) whilst football managers are very well travelled (Guus Hiddink has managed successfully in many countries).  However it is arguabe that football is not strictly a proper business as it seems to be a hobby for very wealthy owners and a goldmine for talented players.  In that sense football is similar to investment banking in that the players/bankers seem to end up with all the money whilst someone else bears the losses…

Boards should stop wasting money on Ratchet, Ratchet & Bingo and use some common sense instead. These recessionary times provide the perfect opportunity to resist the ever-upward cost of executive compensation packages (the argument runs that surely each of our executives deserves to be paid upper quartile pay or we otherwise admit that, by definition, we have sub-standard managers).