@MAW Said
Given that international football in this country is a dead duck, who cares who gets the job? the players don't care a hoot about England and neither does the premier league. Look how many talented Scottish managers there are in the PL and then look how Scotland do? Even under Fergie Scotland struggled in '86. Face it, it's the champions league that matters now. Time to accept that and forgot about the WC and the Euro's
I don't think internantional football is a dead duck, it's just swamped by the sheer selfishness of the supporters of the top clubs, and the relentless promotion of the Sky Sports juggernaut continuously pushing the Premiership and Champions League in our faces.
It's only the clubs who achieve Champions League status who say it is "more important", and that's because they're in it. They command the most attention, get most of the press coverage, all of the money and more prime time live TV than anybody else. Impressionable youngsters who look no further than their TV screen to tell them what to watch just go with the flow.
Players, lured by money beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, would kill and eat their own children to be involved in it. The relentless push, push, push of the television machine gives this competition, which is nothing less than a European Super League for the benefit of a few elite clubs. a veneer of importance way beyond what it should have.
But ask any player, in his lucid moments, if really.... deep down... he'd like to be a World Champion. Ask those players who have won a World Cup or their respective continental championship how they felt when they won it.
Wayne Rooney has a Champions League medal already. He may even get another one whilst at Old Trafford, but he'll never get what Bobby Charlton has got. A World Cup. His career will always be lacking something, and he'll know it. Nearly 50 years on, English fans still revere the "Boys of '66". Bobby Charlton, the "White Knight" of English football, is still held in the highest esteem wherever he goes. But when he's in his old age, who will remember Wayne Rooney..?
A Champions League medal makes you a winner today. A world cup makes you immortal.
Those fans at the elite clubs can shrug off international football as irrelevant now, but already, Liverpool are becoming a fading memory in the ECL and their fans are suffering. How long after the departure of Messrs Wenger and Ferguson will it take for that to happen to Arsenal and United..? It can't happen, you say...? Oh, can't it..?
What for their fans then..? They'll whistle a different tune, that's what.
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