Well, I don’t know about you but I was rather enjoying the season so far. Lots of good, exciting and silly football, Klopp grinning happily at Millie (!), a wild-eyed Pep wearing the expression of a man who has peered into the bowels of hell, and has no words for the void of evil he has witnessed, and then there’s Mark Hughes’ sneer of indignation towards the very nature of existence itself. And that’s before we get to the Championship __with Nigel Pearson incredibly already out of a job after being pimped by English pundits for every gig since being sacked by Leicester, Rafa doing his Geordie bodhisattva thing and Huddersfield Town being top, despite having gone foreign. All brilliant.
Yes, it was all going rather nicely, wasn’t it? We’d settled into our groove, into the rhythm of weekly football. It’s a rhythm that I know many of us use as a kind of cultural skeleton upon which to hang our lives. Because I don’t live a 9-to-5 life, and have never ever had a salaried job, I often wake up and have no idea what day it is. How do I work it out? I recall what game was on the previous day, that’s how. That immediately locates me in the week. I rely on football to shape my life, and as the Premier League and the Championship were rolling along happily delivering some excellent games and plenty of talking points for us to discuss over our pints of wine, all was well.
But now it has to stop.
We’ve been having too much of a good time and the fun Nazis have arrived to put pull the plug on our party. Our buzz is about to be severely harshed, man. Our football joint is about to be bogarted, and no-one wants that.
The pre-Christmas, monthly international fortnight-long breaks are one of the worst features of the first half of every season. They break up the flow of league, cup and European football, disrupt the unfolding drama and it is all very, very…and one extra very big, boring. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, we have to watch England playing a side whose name usually ends in an A. Yawn.
It isn’t that I’m not interested in international football, I very much am, but this disruptive, intrusive insertion of it into the season is to the benefit of no-one. The media hate it because there’s no top-flight football to write about. The managers especially hate the fact that players can come back crocked after an international game, which can ruin their season and completely screws __with their planning. It feels like the pause button has been pressed on the season for no good reason and it makes our mentality towards the international games one of mild antagonism and agitation.
There are at least two better ways to accommodate the qualifying games for the tournaments that happen every second year. The first is to go back to playing internationals on Wednesday, in between league games. This was how it was done for most of the history of football. It made international football an extra spoon of gravy splashed on the warming cottage pie of the season. It was delicious, it was desired and it worked well. Today it feels like you’re eating a bloody quinoa and cucumber salad for two weeks whilst looking mournfully at the roast chicken you could have had.
But qualifying tournaments used to be three or four games, not 10 and, as I’m a big fan of the expanded qualifying format, they need to be accommodated somehow. So that 1970s way won’t work now.
But worry not, I have the perfect solution.
There are 10 games to play. You play six in the last three weeks of the pre-tournament season, the final four in the last two of the year the tournament is held. Job done.
The advantages of this is that at the end of every season, there would be a kind of mini international festival of football which would have its own dynamic. It wouldn’t interrupt the league season. It’d be something different to look forward to. We could embrace international football as a concept and not resent it as a Lego brick under the bare foot of our lives.
Remember, this wouldn’t involve playing any more games than now. In fact, if we stopped the pointless friendly games, they’d be playing less. And, just as importanlyt, it effectively frees up at least eight weeks of the season, meaning it could end in early April. Give the players a couple of weeks off and then get into the internationals. Brilliant. We’d all love that. The league is done, Europe and the cup is done. Right, let’s get into this new thing.
The problem we all have with international weeks is, aside from having to watch England play, that it’s all so disruptive to the narrative of the season. This gets us around that. The clubs can relax knowing that even if their players get injured in the internationals, they’ve got the summer to recover.
Obviously, there’ll always be players who get injured mid-season, and miss the whole thing, but that’s a factor which always applies, whenever the games are played. Whoever is left standing at the end of the season is available to be picked.
If this was how it worked, the next two weeks could be anticipated with excitement as the football juggernaut rolled on, building up speed, but instead it has been parked in a lay-by because international football has blocked the road. And you know what the worst thing is? We’ll have to do it all over again next month. Make it stop. Please.
John Nicholson