England lose on penalties again!

Well, it's been a week since my last post and as promised I give you my latest instalment.

For any of you who haven't been alive this week, England, boasters of the all time worst penalty record ever recorded in history, wait for it... lost on penalties. AGAIN! Now, before you go pulling posters off your wall and sobbing into your pillow, you'll be pleased to know, at least for the meantime, that England are not, repeat, NOT out of the World Cup. This is of course a reference to Woody Harrleson's winning slow motion penalty past an inspired, if ever so slightly, malcoordinated, Jamie Theakston, in Sunday's Soccer Aid celebrity-legends match-up. A moment should be taken to applaud the £2.5m raised in aid of Unicef's work in Africa. Moment over. Now, let's all take a much longer moment to recall Robbie William's shambolic penalty fly over the bar, Waddle-stylee... Woooooah... BULLSH*T, AAAAAAAH! Oh, but he's done wonders for charity yaddi yaddi yadda... Pah, he's still an arrogant, loathsome individual. If only Boris Johnson had turned up again wearing his rugby gear. THUD.

My attention for the rest of the game was mostly spent drooling over the entirely unloathsome individual, Zinedine Zidane, though more out of nostalgia than his actual display on the night. Funny how some people will always hold occult status no matter what they do. Recall Zizu's infamous headbutt of yesteryear. If anything, it was lauded for its impeccable technique, the immaculate awareness of space, and the cleanliness of contact, rather than castigated for its maniacal barbarism. He could quite easily have released a literary retort to Matterazzi's highly distasteful, 'The 99 things I could have said to Zidane', namely, 'The 99 ways I could have kicked the shit out of Matterazzi'; and we'd still love him. More, perhaps. I'd buy one.

The same laws seem to apply, at least in Argentina, to the legendary Diego Maradona. This is according to his biographer and journalist, Jimmy Burns, who described his ongoing godlike status on the streets of Buenos Aires in the Independent this week. The cult of Maradona, although maintaining some support with romanticists in England for his youthful footballing brilliance, will forever be tainted by the deplorable yet aptly termed 'Hand of God'. For that is how Maradona sees it - he has been blessed and was just getting a helping hand from his best mate, God. I wonder if he also thought God was on his side after a nervy victory in qualification over Uruguay saw his team through to the World Cup finals, culminating in this attack on his critics:

"To all of you who did not believe in us, and I apologise to the women here, you can suck it and keep sucking it."

Well, at least he's not a misogynist. In all seriousness, I know I was only just going off on one about the majesty of Zidane triumphing over a brutish undercoat but it's not like I'm recommending him for President. It was intended to be more of an observation of the common perception of him in the media and elsewhere, no better displayed than in Mogwai's cinematographic motion picture 'Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait'. Suuurely, however, this Maradona love affair is one step too far down the road of insanity, not for this isolated incident by any means but the package as a whole.

Let's consider for a moment the thought process of the Argentinian F.A. behind his appointment. Pros: ex-footballer, might know something about football; Cons: he's an overweight, obnoxious, drug addict with a lengthy criminal record, who owes an estimated 37 million euros to the Italian government (23 million of which is in interest) and probably can't remember the last twenty years of his life, escaping out of his nostrils along with a steady stream of mucusy gunk. What the Dickens were they thinking? Maybe the magic eight ball came out with "all signs point to yes", I don't know. The only comparable equivalent would be if England pulled Gazza out of Alcholics Anonymous and told him to win the world cup in exchange for a crate of tennents super.

But what's this, only today, literally as I write, Capello's only gone and lost it too. The difference being of course that these overeager reporters weren't told to choke on Mr. Capello's third leg. Quite reasonably, he told them in no uncertain terms but without using this particular term, to fuck off. He wanted some privacy for his team. Fair enough. Nonetheless, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the tabloids rapidly turned this into a cataclysmic shitstorm, in which Capello, recognised and respected for his brooding yet quiet temperament, is depicted like a psychotic loonatic, crazily out of control, and thus, a culpable scapegoat for unsettling whichever England star steps up, twelve yards out, to miss the crucial penalty against, for the sake of irony, an Argentinian side drugged to the eyeballs coz Diego fancied a knees up the night before, and that, we will not only have to face the prospect of sucking it but to keep on sucking it until we concede that Gascoigne is in fact the way to go. Just a thought.

In a roundabout, off the wall kind of way that brings me neatly back to my orignial point, namely, England and penalties. It seems appropriate to address a
rather Frasier Crane-inspired philosophical thought. Is there something inherently feeble about the English mind when faced with a penalty that we inherenly seize up? Are we physiologically programmed to get the Grobbelaar wobblies every time we're in front of the sticks? The fact that we - I know I'm not the only one - even question it suggests that something's at odds. Let's look at the facts. Statistically, a Brazilian is four times more likely to score a penalty than an Englishman; a German, nine times. Technically, I completely made that up but I love how throwing a word in like 'statistically' makes it, statistically, 89 per cent more likely that some one will believe you...

Before I ramble on any further, I don't seriously profess to actually know what I'm talking about. It turns out however, that there is one person who does. John Barnes suggests the problem is a dietary one. Yes, that's right, a mars day does way more than keep the doctor away, it transforms you into a World Cup winner... that, or an 18 stone piece of putty, the message isn't entirely clear.

Well, that's about that. Are England doomed to failure?

I'm listening...