World Cup 2006 and all that crap...

With just seven days to go to the opening game of the 2006 Football World Cup I feel a need to nail my colours to the mast.

A small point first for our readers from the American colonies.

When we say "football" in the rest of the inhabited world we mean that game where you kick a round ball across a pitch for a while whilst trying to put it inside a goal once or twice in 90 minutes, or not at all as the case often is - its that game that you all play if you're women or children, but to make the point again, its not that game where you all dress up in outrageous slabs of kevlar padding and throw an oval ball to each other for 20 seconds at a time before stopping to get your breath back for a while.

I needed to make that point.

It might be easier if I refer to the rest-of-the-world game as "nancyball" rather than "football", its a phrase I prefer to use myself and it will prevent confusion with the padded leviathons game.

So, nancyball it is...

The nancyball world cup - its starts next week.

I shall hide in a nearby cave until it finishes.

Here in England - for in the international nancyball world there is no UK team, we have seperate teams for each of the four UK countries, and unfortunately Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland don't have nancyball teams, well not so that you'd notice anyway - here in England we have been inundated, nay, saturated, nay, wall-to-wall newsround covered in bulletins on the current condition of a toe bone, broken in a game of nancyball some weeks ago by an England player who apparently is vital to Englands world cup hopes.

Its not for nothing that Wayne Rooney has earned the nickname "Shrek", he is not a good looking lad, in fact I now have doubts as to whether the Shrek films were animated or not, I honestly believe that the main character part was probably played by Wayne Rooney in a live action / animated movie genre made famous by Gene kelly and Jerry Mouse in "Anchors Aweigh", but I digress.

Mr Rooney apparently is the only England player capable of scoring goals, having no interest in the nancyball game I cannot confirm or deny this, I simply report what has been flung at me in saturation by the English press, we shall not win the world cup unless Shrek plays for England and so every day we have an update on his broken toebone on every news channel and every day I switch off when Shreks face appears.

You see the problem with nancyball is that its protagonists have been elevated by the press to the status of gods and it seems like the whole world outside of the USA have gone along with the hoax, except me. I feel like the little boy in the Hans Christian Anderson story of The Kings New Clothes, any day now, and probably while the whole of the known world is slavering in delight over their TV screens at the latest dullfest involving two teams from parts of the world that you couldn't point to on a map, I am going to run out into the street and bawl out "this game is crap", and no-one would hear me, beacuse they are all watching what their media has dubbed "the beautiful game" - my arse.

Why England will never win the World Cup

This theory has been developed over decades of being force fed nancyball on an almost daily basis by friends and family who have fallen for the Kings New Clothes dialogue, its an observation from someone who isn't at all inspired by the game and who sees its protagonists as big wet nancies who fall over writhing in mortal and terminal agonies if you stand too close to them or, god forbid, have the temerity to touch them with any part of your body.

England will never win the world cup because they play to draw.

Yes you heard it here first.

The little boy at the back of the crowd has just stood up and pulled the wool from your eyes, the king is naked, and still you do not see.

In the English leagues it is regarded as "a result" if you can reach a stalemate after 90 minutes of play. If a team is playing an away game then a draw, whether scoreless or not, is regarded as a victory, and if a team is playing a home game then a draw is also ok, you get one point in the league table for a draw and a draw is better than losing and having no point at all.

And so for nine months of the year the players in the English football leagues set out evey weekend with the express intention of making it impossible for their opponents to score against them while at the same time forgetting that in order to win then they need to score at least one more goal, when 90 minutes is reached with no result, then that is a result for both teams, well played, good game.

So we take an England football team to the world cup every four years who are well coached in the art of drawing football games and in the initial group matches they unsuprisingly draw at least one of the first three games which immediatley puts them at a disadvantage to the other teams in the group who astonishingly have arrived at the tournement with a desire to score more goals than their opponents and therefore win all of their games.

It will only take an uninspiring draw against Paraguay and a loss against Sweden, with Paraguay beating Trinidad, for the panic button to be slammed in the English press, and once again the nancyball supporters will be left in bars all over europe, but especially in this country, stood with a bottle of beer in their hand, shaking their heads and wondering where it all went wrong - well you heard it here first again - England football teams like to draw games too much.

My tip for the world cup - buy stock in beer companies, and razor blade and rope manufacturers.