A Sticker's Worth 500 Words

Mat Jolin-Beech addresses the elephant in the FA’s room at the moment with a look at some of the runners and riders for the vacant England men’s team job. Our subject did great things in South East London once upon a time and, as an aside, his brother has been manager of The Who since the 1970s so clearly has the necessary skills to deal with rockstar attitudes. Over to Mat to plead his case. Now the dust has settled on another England failure, although getting to the Euro 2024 finals and being beaten by a promising and already good Spain team, the Three Lions are looking for a new manager. Gareth Southgate , for all the hate he received, did a decent job with the national team. Two finals, a semi-final and a quarter. Not bad for a national that failed to qualify for the Euros only back in 2008 . Yes, he probably should have been more adventurous with his tactics, style, and substitutions. Yes, the football was the most turgid and stodgy thing I have seen in a long, long time, and rem

Football as we know and love it is back. Gone is the unity of major international tournaments in place of nine months of social media beef and screaming obscenities at that bloke you professed your undying love for in the summer. The optimism you may have, briefly, experienced as Ollie Watkins crashed his shot past Bart Verbruggen can now be put aside for the misery of a barren run in the winter months or a humiliating FA Cup exit. Moreover the men in the middle come back under the microscope after a summer of almost frightening levels of competence. Despite spending my formative years suggesting that the nation’s referees enjoyed a bit too much extracurricular self-love there were very few who stood out as individuals. As a Football Italia obsessive I recognised the imperious Pierluigi Collina and enjoyed the flourishes of John Toro Rendon, whom we imaginatively nicknamed ‘The Colombian Ref’ in the primary school playground , at France ’98 but the vast majority of the men in black we