A Game of Two Halves - Denglischer Fussball

Stuart Pearce’s claim for the England managership.

Stuart Pearce declared this week that he would love to manage at England at Euro 2012, but would be uncomfortable taking the job on further, due to his being, in his own words, a “lightly raced coach”.

English football then, still labours under the bizarre illusion that if a man’s achievements have not been sufficiently covered by the press, they are worth less than those of a man who is constantly in the limelight. There are myriad reasons why Pearce may not be suited to the England manager’s post long term, but a lack of inexperience is ostensibly not one of them.

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A word to the wise for the Robben-haters.

As the last remnant of the “Bayern Oranje” team which brought Dutch flair (complete with defeat in a major final) to the banks of the Isar, Arjen Robben must surely expect a bit of stick from the German press. The past few weeks may have been one of the Dutchman’s most disappointing since joining FC Bayern in 2009, but the criticism to which he has been subject has been nothing if not disproportionate.

That the anti-Robben campaign has been fronted by former Bayern plaers is hardly surprising. Olaf Thon dismissed the Dutchman and his French teammate Fracnk Ribéry as “unmotivated prima donnas”, and Mario Basler has declared, with his usual discretion, that “Robben must go”.

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The end of the Capello era.

To paraphrase an example of light hearted patriotism from a better man than I, who do you think you are kidding, Mr Capello? If the Italian’s reign as England manager could have ended in a more typically farcical manner, it probably would have had to involve Benny Hill. The man who once stripped John Terry of the captaincy has resigned on moral grounds. Why? Because John Terry has been stripped of the captaincy.

That the FA were contractually quite justified in not consulting Capello in that decision, that the decision in itself was quite ostensibly the correct one given the legal storm surrounding the former England captain seem to have been erased from the Italian’s brain in the blink of an eye. The blink of an eye with which it took him to perceive that this was his chance. His golden ticket out of a job which had become as tedious to him as it had been to the England fans who have long been eagerly awaiting his departure.

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Schalke’s M Word

Listening to some of the stuff that comes out of Gelsenkirchen in the form of media soundbites these days, you’d think they were all a bunch of masochists. Not only is the “M Word” a forbidden profanity, it is also a risible suggestion, according to most of the declarations from Horst Heldt, Huub Stevens and co.

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