English cricket is better than English football

This may be a more idiotic idea than leaving your girlfriend in a room with Chris Gayle and a bottle of Hennessy, but winning the World Cup in 1966 was the worst thing that ever happened to English football. It was certainly the worst thing that ever happened to English football for any England fan under fifty. Jolly as it may have been at the time, it allowed us to disregard the lessons of the shattering 1953 defeat at the hands of Puskas and the Hungarians and instead value jingoism over strategy and Lionheartedness over technique - a terrible handicap for the national team which club sides' occasional triumphs in Europe increasingly fail to disguise. I'm not suggesting Alf Ramsey or his boys were lacking in strategy or technique, merely that their victory was long used as a convenient bolster for the more general argument across all parts of the game, from school playing fields to newspapers, that British bulldogs are more likely to win international tournaments than foreign butterflies. The simple fact is that they're not. 

It gets a bit weary watching the harem scarem of the Premier League at times, but sitting among and listening to the home support at QPR a couple of weeks ago as their side were taken apart by Liverpool was a sporting botox for me: "These lot don't like it up 'em and we ain't got up 'em at all!"; "Don't be clever!"; "Get rid!"; the collective groans when a full back had no forward option so instead passed the ball backwards. These were a few fans and I know such attitudes are not universal, but hearing this stuff made me think English football had been preserved in jelly since I started watching it twenty-seven years ago - a facade housed within a time machine which drops you in a dispirited, bitter heap every two years at a stop marked "out on penalties in the quarters".  This spittle and aggression doesn't just come from within the distraught geezers of Loftus Road and wherever but, more pertinently and worryingly, the parents and coaches who devote so much of their time to supporting youth football in England whilst at the same time, in many cases, spoiling children's enjoyment of it.

I live in the Czech Republic but am English and in the space of two weeks back home in the UK over Christmas - as well as the QPR game - I saw an Under-12s match where the parents' calls from the sidelines (see above) made Sam Allardyce look like an advocate for Tiki-Taka. Worse still, a member of my family said that her own son and several other mothers' had come home from an Under-7s (SEVEN) game in tears because the coach had been such a snarling brute. This is speculation mingled with generalisation, but I just don't think you get that from parents and coaches in Spain or Italy or France, replacing a kid's joy of keeping hold of a football with the fear of being caught in possession of it. I grant you their national side are a tad defensive, but the video below suggests it doesn't look like you get it from parents and coaches in Greece, either. 

Arguably, though,  parents or paying punters have a right to shout what they like, however much it  screws things up for any England fan hoping to witness even a semi-final appearance in a major tournament. It's hard to make that case for football's paid analysts, however, which largely comprise of ex-players like Andy Townsend whose contributions often seem to just entail hinting that foreigners "don't fancy this" and journalists who have an almost sexual smugness because they spoke to 'Arry in the week and 'Arry said this and oh do give it a rest, pal. Nick Knight gets a hard time for his somewhat flimsy observations on cricket which regularly induce awkward silences or chastisement or both from his fellow Sky commentators, but he has the eloquence and insight of Buddha next to the likes of Niall Quinn or Paul Walsh or whoever it is sat next to that other hyperbolic apologist with a microphone, Peter Drury. This show of cliche and delusion is all played out to a backdrop of xenophobic Paddy Power betting adverts quite possibly scripted by Jim Davidson and just as funny as his police charge sheet. Athletico Kebab's country might be hilarious with their poverty and goats, but I'll give you evens they have more possession than England the next time they come to Wembley.

We complain about cricket coverage, but I'd rather listen to Nick Knight analyse his sock drawer than the average football co-commentator.
— Pavilion Opinions (@pavilionopinion) January 13, 2013

The way cricket's TV and internet rights are sold is a stone tablet business in a tablet age, but for all the quibbles about the ECB's deal with Sky or chairman Giles Clarke's Allen Stanford folly, since the English game first shacked up with Rupert Murdoch in the 1990s the governing body has ploughed money into its grassroots and the national side's recent successes - certainly in comparison with the displays of twenty years ago - along with a glut of fine young talent are surely not coincidental to this fact. There are plenty of gags about the two men and a dog who watch County Championship games but at least they get to see the players they watch on wet April afternoons winning international trophies, although it's fair to point out cricket's rather more lax rules concerning a player's international eligibility have served England  - or 'South Africa B' as some wags label them - rather well. 

We might fret about the power of national boards when it comes to TV revenue, especially in the case of India's BCCI where they now essentially buy their own rights themselves, but it's preferable to have English cricket's power with responsibility than English football's convenient lack of either. Unlike the ECB, the FA can claim they're not culpable for the national side's decline because they don't get the bulk of Sky's riches to spend. The Premier League and its clubs can claim they're not culpable for the national side's decline because it's not their job to care. Those that do, however, have been getting a raw deal from the England team ever since Bobby Moore picked up that bloody trophy forty-seven years ago.