It seems that the England football team are going through a bit of a popularity crisis. Well, the England men’s team are anyway, but we’ll get onto that later. Can it be true? Is interest in our national team at an all-time low?
Ask any football fan within these islands (and beyond for that matter) who they consider to be the best Scottish manager of all time, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the shortlist will contain the usual suspects. Unquestionably, and understandably, said list will feature Matt Busby, Bill Shankly, Jock Stein and, more recently, Alex Ferguson.
Professional footballers are not role models for young men, regardless of what the FA thinks about Rio Ferdinand. Well, generally, they're not very good ones at least. So all credit to Saido Berahino, who's dedicated his first senior England call up to his mum…
Mentality, attitude, desire, concentration. They’re all slightly different things that are essential in the game we know and love. Singularly they’re important, together they are key to what makes a player or a team as good as they can possibly be. And over the last few weeks we have seen more than a few examples of how bad things can go when these things are missing.
Southampton Football Club's meteoric rise, it seemed, was over. This summer the wheels had well and truly come off at St Mary’s, and a team that had just enjoyed an impressive campaign and should have been building on an 8th place finish were now being touted as firm relegation favourites. Oh how wrong we all were.