Wales!

Day -712. ‪WorldCup2018‬

Wow Wales, wow! Or that could be wow, Platini, wow! What a win for Wales today against the most expensive national team ever. The experts may have been right with their talk of "team spirit" and "strong units" overcoming teams of individuals. Actually, I concede that they have been proved right. And Platini's dream of a World Cup II may have come true. We scoffed at the Euros becoming so big, but how is the next World Cup going to live up to this excitement? But are teams like Wales going to qualify for the next World Cup? They finished second in their qualifying group, and in World Cup qualifying that would have meant a playoff against another second placed team. With more countries in Europe now, Platini would have been pushing even harder for more European spots at future World Cups.

In other news, repeated every two years, English football is going through another post mortem. This time it has the added depth, repeated every four years (at least), of including a search for a new manager. There will be talk of coaching systems, the league structure, the amount of matches played in a season, the amount of foreign players in the Premier League, and more. Most of the factors seem to work pretty well for all the Welsh players who play in the Premier League. And we have a slew of ex-England players voicing their disgust at the performance of the England team. Unless they were part of the 1966 World Cup winning team, what did they acheive that was that much better than this bunch?
Ok, let's give the 1990 team a bit of credit for plodding through the first round, beating Belgium in extra time and needing two penalties to beat Cameroon and make the semi-finals. Almost the same team was shockingly bad at the Euros in 1988 and equally pathetic in 1992. So when Chris Waddle says he is furious that the FA didn't have a replacement lined up for Roy Hodgson, I think: he has a point (they were pretty sure he was leaving, so could have done something to get ready for World Cup qualifying) but when was it ever any different? And, anyway, if you look at other European teams only the Germans seem to have a system of a manager-in-training with Low so successfully moving from assistant to Klinsmann to manager. Every other country mostly follows the same method: well that was embarassing, let's fire this guy and find a new one. Are there any good club managers in our league, or maybe a foreigner with a decent reputation? That thinking really worked out well for Greece with Ranieri.

The problems with English football are the not the same problems that France have when they under perform, or Holland when they fail to qualify, or any other country that believes they should be amongst the best in the world. There is no one solution that works for every country. On the other end of the spectrum, any small country should be able to follow Iceland's example and be successful. But it won't work that way. And the manager is not the only solution although I will argue that Marc Wilmots should be able to do more with that Belgian team.

There is a lot more to the management of a country's football success, so many angles to it. And England's failings are easily the subject of a dissertation. Somebody should write it.