Without wishing to labour the point, England are out of The World Cup at the group stage for the first time since the Crimean War or something. I don't really care to be honest; I find it difficult to get excited by international football. What does stick in the craw, however, is the bare-faced bullshit spouted by the players and manager in the post match trawl through the entrails.
The game was a dead rubber. Costa Rica were through and so fielded a team of ladies, children and the lame. And the thinking was that as England had phuque-all to lose, they would play with abandon and invention. As it turned out, they reverted to type and played a ponderous lumpen version of the game; thereby proving, je suppose, that you cannot make a silk purse out of a pig's perineum.
Current manager, Roy "Woy" Hodgson, opted to play some youngsters in order to blood them at this rarefied level. Sadly, they were all found wanting. Probably the worst aspect was the absence of a recognisable football formation; they just seemed to meander about the pitch in a loose confederacy of ineptitude. What had Woy said to them beforehand to prompt that?
So the game petered out, bringing down the curtain on a shambolic tournament for this sceptred isle's finest - not that you've have known this from the words of the protagonists afterwards. Good Lord, no! England played some "good stuff" apparently. There was plenty of scope for optimism. Unfortunately this was absolutely at odds with the empirical evidence available to those with eyes. England weren't awful, just very ordinary and anodyne.
There was a vee awkward stand-off between Woy and a BBC reporter straight after the game. The reporter opened with a carefully-weighted and accurate precis, along the lines that the game didn't really get going, did it? Woy took odds with this. And they wonder why England supporters get hacked-off. You don't have to have played the game at the highest level to recognise a shit game when you see one. It's a variation of the old "I've never been to the North Pole, but I know it's cold" argument. If he'd fetched-up and confirmed what we already knew, people would have said "fair enough". Expectations were pretty low to begin with.
Tossers.
