That England weren’t up to snuff in the Euro 2008 qualifiers isn’t rocket science and you don’t have to be the bastard love child of Hercule Poirot and Mystic Meg to realise this. Or maybe you do…

To borrow from and distort Spinal Tap, all the press hype surrounds us like a turd tuxedo of tabloid twaddle. Everywhere we turn, we are forced to view life through the tabloids' rancid prism, as they trough from the gutters for more sensationalist bile.

If I told you that I agreed with The Times’ Gab Marcotti that Blackburn's Christopher Samba ''is better than every single Manchester United defender”, you’d probably scoff, and possibly express your disgust with my lack of football knowledge. But why? Because the tosspot tabs have distorted our views, and if it isn’t top four it isn’t any good. Period.

'We are forced to view life through the tabloids rancid prism, as they trough from the gutters for more sensationalist bile'


Every day the press throw us garrulous tripe that we gobble up so willingly that now, whenever certain players' names are mentioned, we react as if presented with a rigged Rorschach test:

• Martin O’Neill? Brilliant for Villa
• Mark Hughes? Far better than Graeme Souness
• Arsenal? A team with class and a proud history
• Tottenham? Currently in a slump
• Everton? A small club
• Christopher Samba? Nowhere near as good as any Manchester United defender
• England? Utterly craptastic, their limp performances are simply unacceptable.

The press have trained us to have a feral Pavlovian froth around our outraged mouths when any of the following things happen; Spurs slump (hang on, have they ever NOT been in a slump, apart from in 1961?), someone wants to move grounds away from their traditional base (Arsenal were doing this in the 1920s), England fail to qualify for a tournament (didn’t they do that for pretty much all of the 1970s?)

The real answers to our Rorschach test should be as follows:

• Martin O’Neill? In his first 56 games at Villa he was outperformed by David O’Leary and his record so far is considerably worse than Ron Atkinson, John Gregory, Brian Little and even Graham Taylor’s first stint.

• Mark Hughes? A record that is an almost exact mirror image of Souness’ – except for one vital factor. Hughes hasn’t won anything.

• Arsenal? Herbert Chapman is talked about too much and Henry Norris too little. Not so proud episodes of moving ground and muscling in on the more lucrative north London fan-base as well as somehow gaining promotion from fifth place and simultaneously getting Tottenham relegated through shady administrative contortions.

• Tottenham? Haven’t ever had a sustained dynastic string of success.

• Everton? Historically the fifth most successful English club, even above Spurs! (look it up, pedants).

• Christopher Samba? Quite possibly good enough for any team in the Premier League.

• England? Perennially cr*ptastic, and compared to the 70s not that bad.

I think the problem is that it is simply too much fun to go with the crowd, and bash people simply on a wave of collective tabloid emotion. But the truth of the matter is that what the majority think is usually utter guff.

But with this appeal for realism, please don’t think I am asking for a return to the legendary footballing years of bygone eras. I despise all this wittering on about the 'good old days', a mysterious alternate universe where England were a world footballing power, nobody moved grounds, players played fewer games and the domestic leagues were a wonderful hotpot of competition. I’m sorry but this is pure, unadulterated faeces.

The 'good old days' were terrible, our league was horrendous, the England team was cr*p, 1966 was a home victory, even Sweden managed to get to the World Cup Final when they hosted it, for God’s sake!

If the 'good old days' were so wonderful, how did we have a match-fixing scandal (Tony Kay et al) decades before the Serie A bribery sensations? If players are paid too much now, do we really want to go back to the old days when a measly tuppence ha’penny was dropped into a player’s shoe for scoring a double hat-trick with all the trimmings?

The great Brazilian winger Garrincha’s biographer, Ruy Castro, writes on Brazil’s 1958 World Cup squad before they departed to Sweden: “The majority had intestinal parasites to spare, several were anaemic, one player even had syphilis. There were precarious bladders, tonsils begging to be removed and players with chronic digestive and circulatory problems.” So let’s not moan about a return to the good old days.

All I really want is realism and consistency, it is knee-jerk stereotypes and press hype that wind me up. I’ll leave you with a tale of two players, Duncan Ferguson and Zinedine Zidane; one headbutted a player in Scotland and got six weeks in Barlinnie prison, the other headbutted a player in the World Cup Final, and trudged away a free - albeit tear-stained - man.