Have you recovered from another idiosyncratic international week for the England football side? Like a visit from a demanding relative or a night on base speed, it all tends to go on a couple of days longer than it should. Primarily, though, the experience is characterised by things that would only happen with England and that we all have to pretend are normal. But surely aren’t.
At least we know this is a national side that has long subordinated performance to histrionic plotlines. So in some ways, it was not any more bonkers than usual that Wayne Rooney should choose to give a press conference announcing his retirement two years before he has scheduled it to happen. I assume his people had seen how well announcing your retirement with a massive lead-in time worked for Tony Blair and David Cameron, and wanted a piece of what it reaps for their own client. I’d have preferred it if Rooney had, like Cameron, made the announcement during an at-home interview in his well-appointed kitchen – probably while fannying about with some charcuterie – but you take what you can get. Maybe he had a packet of smoky bacon crisps after he got offstage.
The bigger question (but only slightly) is whether Rooney is now a lame duck England captain or not. Counterintuitively, the answer seems to be not – and it’s all thanks to his office junior, Big Sam. Even as Rooney appeared to surrender his power, you will have noted, his manager appeared desperate to oblige him by surrendering a far more significant portion of his own. In the wake of England’s basically unwatchable last-minute win in Slovakia, Allardyce was moved to respond to questions about Rooney’s playing position with some comments so absurd I’ve read them at least 10 times and am still convinced he must have said them for a dare.
“Wayne played where he wanted to,” explained Allardyce, sounding for all the world like he was deferring to our own, slightly superior version of Paolo Maldini. “I think he holds a lot more experience at international football than I do as an international manager,” Big Sam continued, sounding a lot like Smaller Sam. “So, when he’s using his experience and playing as a team member, it’s not for me to say where he’s going to play.”
Now, you might be one of those people tempted to respond to this by cackling: “That’s precisely what it is for you to say, you ludicrous plonker.” Indeed, you might even be one of those people who wishes to query Allardyce’s insistence that Rooney “was brilliant and controlled midfield”, perhaps on the basis that he wasn’t and he didn’t. If so, you are strongly encouraged to relax and accept the possibility that England’s adventures in irrelevance are constantly evolving.
Anyone with the misfortune to be a regular reader of this column will know that the position of England captain is generally regarded as analogous to that of a regimental goat. When far more successful countries are quite happy to simply give the armband to the oldest player on the pitch, there are few more telling displacement activities than the English obsession with who wears it. Interestingly, Allardyce appears to be mixing things up on the irrelevance front. His Rooney comment hints that it is now the England manager’s job that is largely ceremonial, with decisions such as who plays where devolved to senior players. Perhaps like the various regimental mascots, Sam’s job description will eventually be commuted down to not making a mess on the parade ground.
Other developments that could only be described as “such an England move”? Well, important shrink changes were announced, and at length. England have switched therapists. The side no longer retain the services of Steve Peters, the sports psychiatrist brought in by Roy Hodgson for the past two international tournaments. Indeed, Steve may well still be in some kind of residential therapy himself after that Iceland performance. England’s new head doctor is a whole firm of sports psychologists – Lane 4, the commercial enterprise of the former swimming champion Adrian Moorhouse. “This is a company with many facets in their locker,” explained Allardyce opaquely. All that remained was for him to underscore the psychological toll of playing for England: “As human beings, when we get criticised, we hurt. We really do.” A comment that reminded me of nothing quite so much as Stephen Fry’s defence of actors upset by the attentions of the ghastly press: “They cry, you know. They do cry.”
Finally, the new FA chairman, Greg Clarke, offered his thoughts on the old chairman’s monument: the clock Greg Dyke had installed at St George’s Park that counts down to the day – the hour – when England win the World Cup in 2022. Think of it as the Greg Stone. His successor Clarke declared witheringly: “These things are a joke,” before undoing all that good realism and speculating that Rooney might well wish to un-pre-retire and keep playing for England beyond the 2018 World Cup.
So there you have it. Just another week in the England setup, which parted company with normality a couple of looking glasses ago. Henceforth, do work on the principle that it is all covertly scripted by the Premier League, with the specific aim of making people yearn for a return to its relative sanities.
