And there's the whistle. Tear it all down, Gulati on down.
Now you have an inkling of what it's been like trying to support the English national team any time after 1966. It's this; rinse, repeat ad nauseam.
The English national team has won six matches in the knockout stages of a major international tournament after 1966. That's nearly 60 years of futility, in which we have captured the scalps of Paraguay (1986), Belgium (1990), Cameroon (1990), Spain (1996), Denmark (2002) and Ecuador (2006). Other than Spain, pre-tiki taka dominance, that's hardly a who's who of world football. Most recently, of course, England was eliminated from the 2014 World Cup after only two of its three group matches, and from the 2016 Euros in the first knockout round...by Iceland.
What has never changed, throughout these 60 years, is the governing body. The suits have spent the time fortifying their positions within the FA so that we end up with a succession of unsuitable and/or ill-equipped team managers, selected for their inability to challenge the status quo, culminating in them picking Gareth Southgate off the managerial scrap heap and installing him in - supposedly - the most prestigious role in English football. This is a crowd, remember, that lost an argument over corruption with FIFA. Fucking FIFA!
The U.S. really does need to burn this to the ground and start again. Like Germany has done; like Spain did. Otherwise, decades of getting almost imperceptibly worse, year on year, will happen; until the organisation is so royally fucked from top to bottom that it's beyond redemption. Like England.
