In the Beginning, Back in 2022

At the last World Cup in 2022, if we ignore that it was in Qatar for a second, the tournament was the correct size with 32 teams and in the correct format.  Half the teams went out in every round and the top 2 from each group progressed – as it should be.  32 went to 16, 16 to 8, 8 to 4, 4 to 2 and Argentina won it.  It wasn’t perfect of course because it was in Qatar and Gianni Infantino was in charge of FIFA.  The general thought at the time was that Gianni at least, would be better than Sepp Blatter, who got found guilty of corruption around World Cup bid processes. I wonder what the opinion is now.  The signs were there when some celebrity chef twat was on the pitch getting pictures with Messi after the final, when Messi for his part was draped in some sort of Qatari ceremonial cloak to receive the cup.  Sportswashing much?  No issues with the hosts next time though…. America …Fuck Yeah! (with help from Mexico and Canada to partially dilute the shitshow)

Anyway, the format of the actual football in Qatar was great, but we reckoned without men in suits who have seemingly all read Football Visionary Rasmus Ankersen’s book and swallowed its mantra of “if it’s not broke, consider breaking it”.  And so it came to pass that the FIFA suits took a perfect format and I can imagine them going to a wine bar, having a few too many glasses and deciding on a few ways that they could fuck it up.

Closing time brought the following:  Add another 16 teams – yeah I know it makes 48 and that’s a shit number but bigger is better yeah?  Oh yeah, and we’ll put the teams in 16 groups of three..

Everyone knew straight away that groups of three with two teams going through would mean ‘collusion’ games between whichever two teams were playing last in the group and in 2022, FIFA acknowledged how good the group stage was with groups of four and the level of jeopardy caused by two teams going out and goal difference giving you a reason to go for it in your last game.  So, the groups of three were ditched and now we have 12 groups of 4 but oh no, we can’t do it like last time as that would give us 24 teams left, so we have to introduce a 3rd Place Tombola of Shite. One more thing, goal difference and goals scored has been used since football began to decide teams on level points, but we need something new so we’ll introduce Head-To-Head because, why not. 

Wait til you hear what FIFA want for 2030 – 64 teams and 6 automatic qualifiers – the three hosts of Spain, Portugal and Morocco and 3 teams selected to commemorate 100 years since the first world cup in 1930 – Uruguay I get because they won the first edition – but Argentina and Paraguay? They are in courtesy of being part of a failed bid to host the 2030 World Cup in its entirety.

Group Stage

So anyway, 2026 and here we are in America, Land of the Free, where in fact nothing is free and nothing is even reasonably priced, especially tickets and travel.  I am reminded of the old maxim – America plus football always equals Shit.  They just can’t help themselves. Rumours are kicking round of various national football federations acting as ticket touts – pictures being posted online of match tickets with the name of the original buyer printed on them. Interesting.

Countdowns to kick-off of both halves are a thing – get in the bin.  We are not launching a fucking rocket.  Then the game starts, runs for 20-odd minutes and then it’s hydration breaks for adverts but they don’t admit that and so don’t stop the clock or call it quarters – that would be far too obvious. The good news is though that when Infantino says FIFA make no money from these sponsored hydration breaks, we all believe him. 

Infantino turns up at virtually every game, like a turd that won’t flush. There’s a FIFA Presidency election votes in a few months and he needs to be as visible as possible so that all the nations that aren’t here can remember who to vote for.

Once the matches started, I got engaged with the massive spreadsheet of games and who would be playing who in the knockouts and I had a raised eyebrow over how ‘random’ the draw was.  The three home teams basically got gifted with easy groups and a last 32 game against a 3rd place team from another weakish group..  USA’s path was the easiest group and then probably Bosnia, predicted to finish 3^rd in the second weakest group, which contained co-host Canada.  Mexico of course get the advantage that whoever they play can’t breathe – more on that later – they’ll be fine until the Quarter Finals, when of course, all games have to be played in the US, despite the Azteca being the best ground being used, by miles, because it has football heritage of some description.

So, the Group Stage – Spoiler alert. It was long – it was boring – everyone got through who you knew would get through (apart from Uruguay), and Scotland didn’t.

One early game featured Argentina and featured a reminder that VAR is selective and applied differently to different players. Messi trod on someone’s calf near the back of the knee and nothing happened. VARgentina was back.  So, Messi can commit fouls that would get virtually any other player in the world sent off but should we be surprised, the bar was set when Cristiano Ronaldo had his mandatory ban ripped up to allow him to play in the first two games for Portugal.

America’s group stage highlight was their own team steaming through their first two games and qualifying, closely followed by making Iran’s World Cup next to impossible, with them having to travel in and out of the USA every time they played.  Also, their players got questioned on what their government does. Oddly, no one asked Christian Pulisic, Captain America to tell us what he thought about America bombing Iran and the President’s thousands of appearances in those files that he hopes we’ve all forget about? As it was Iran of course, there was no investigation into Austria and Algeria’s draw, which eliminated Iran – The US head of security admitted he ‘did a happy dance’ when Iran went out.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Austria simply repaid the debt they owed Algeria from the 1982 Disgrace of Gijon, when they colluded with the then West Germans to knock Algeria out by walking through a 1-0 defeat.  In 2026 it was all heading for a nice 2-2 draw until Riyad Mahrez accidentally scored a 90th minute goal, causing some interesting reactions from the benches of the two nations, along the lines of “That wasn’t in the script you twats”.  Needless to say, Austria equalised in the 96^th minute and Iran went out.  FIFA are supposed to care about this and care about fairness and care about their member nations, but do they really?  Do they fuck.   

Elsewhere there was Paraguay v Australia, a game in which a draw was always the most likely result, given that it guaranteed both teams progressed.  Very slow handclap for the tournament format there..

The group stages throws the spotlight on the TV media.  We’ve had the usual array of TV Pundits across the BBC and ITV – some good some bad.  Voice of Enthusiasm Lee Dixon still does not realise he has the best job in the world, even if he does have to spend it sat next to Sam Matterface, while he desperately tries to say something iconic and just sounding like the sort of guy you just want to avoid.  On the BBC you have high quality from Alan Shearer, Joe Hart, Wayne Rooney (surprisingly) and Micah Richards.  ITV have The Overlap crew in Neville and Keane and even had an appearance of arch-shithouse Gary Lineker, who of course recently got binned off by the BBC.  We also of course have Emma Hayes (who is really good) but instead of being given a hi-tech screen to explain tactics, they give her a blackboard and a backdrop that looked like a kitchen. For fucks sake.

Someone, somewhere decided that Olivier Giroud would be good on TV but he’s like an advert for assisted dieing.  People choose to go kill themselves when listening to him.  We have in-studio referees explaining decisions – Christina Unkle and her platitudes or Darren Cann and his helium balloon infused stating of the blindingly obvious.  Well it’s all gone a bit Mickey Mouse so I guess that fits. 

The BBC had had an obsession with Scotland (Group Stage Only of Course) and painting them as gallant and over-achieving – They. Are. Shit.  The departing Steve Clarke has been painted as achieving great things by qualifying, when it’s never been easier to qualify.  They set up to beat Haiti 1-0 and then lose 1-0 to both Morocco and Brazil, aiming for finishing 8^th in the 3^rd Place Shit-Off.  If that’s the limit of your ambition then you get what you deserve. Unfortunately for that plan, they lost 3-0 to Brazil.  Clarke had some good players at his disposal, but he doesn’t seem to realise that if you give the likes of Grant Hanley, Lyndon Dykes and Kenny McLean minutes, you’d drag down the rest even if the others are eight of the best players in the world.  One of the other eight who is possibly not world class, is Angus Gunn and the image of him flailing through the air, waving at nothing as Vini Jr nodded into a vacant goal will be one of the enduring images of the World Cup for me.  Yes, despite all the bullshit things going on at this World Cup, you have to thank Scotland for providing amazing a good old hatewatch.  Scotland are used to the concept of a hatewatch as they support anyone but England, so I’m sure they’ll forgive me pissing myself at Scotland having to spend five days watching every other groups’ 3rd place team finish above them in the 3rd place Shit-Off until they dropped out of the tournament. 

England’s group stage was the usual mixed bag – great and entertaining against Croatia in a 4-2 win, clueless and slightly fortunate in a 0-0 draw against Ghana and functional in a 2-0 win against Panama. There wasn’t much else notable – Spain drew with Cape Verde, who then managed to qualify at the expense of Uruguay, who found out that the hype of Bielsa is better than the reality. We also had the sight of Cristiano Ronaldo leading the line in static fashion befitting a 41-year old, for Portugal and over-celebrating two goals against Uzbekistan.

Round of 32

After Scotland went home, we got the second phase and the new Round of 32. The highlights of this round were the Dutch getting beaten on penalties by Morocco, in a clash of two teams that should not have met at this stage, but you know, all three co-hosts had to have it easy-ish. The co-hosts all got through with USA, Canada and Mexico beating the might of Bosnia, South Africa and Ecuador. And then there was Germany losing to Paraguay.  No matter how average they are now – it will never not be funny watching Germany exit a major tournament.  They lost on penalties for additional English viewing pleasure.  Commentators on TV were all over this like it was an occurrence on par with a meteorite hitting the earth.  Maybe in bygone times, the Germans just had better players. Paraguay were everyone’s heroes for a bit, but that didn’t last very long. The genuine heroes were Cape Verde who took Argentina to extra time before eventually bowing out.

I guess I need to talk about England and DR Congo. No one thought this game would be too challenging, until we went 1-0 down and there were just 20 minutes to go when Harry Kane baled us out.  So, we have now safely negotiated the group and Round of 32, and Thomas Tuchel had safely negotiated not admitting that his squad picks were shite and the gift horse he was presented with when Tino Livramento got injured, was not so much looked in the mouth, as kicked in the nuts, as Tommy called up another centre back who might be able to play full back but probably can’t.

As we’re in the knockout rounds I realise that planted fans appears to be a thing.  These are fake fans who mug off on TV looking all happy when ‘their’ team is 1-0 down in the break between the third and fourth quarter.  No genuine football fan looks happy at that point and if you get a camera stuck in your face and see yourself on the jumbotron, you give a one finger salute and mouth obscenities.  Where’s the fan culture?  Where are the fan chants on TV – Where’s “with his bag of sweets and a cheeky smile, Donald Trump is a ……”.  FIFA suits don’t like fan culture.

Round of 16

Mexico v England. Tommy T’s first choice average centre back at right back was Jarrel Quansah and with England 2-1 up after a Bellingham brace, Quansah got sent off so we had to beat Mexico at altitude in the Azteca, with ten. There was an excahange of penalty goals and 20 minutes of defending our six yard box and Mexico throwing desperate crosses into the box for Dan Burn to head away. It was to be fair, one of the great England away performances as England and Tommy won the breathing competition in the Mexican’s Azteca backyard.  It was unfair and probably dangerous to health with no time to acclimatize, but what’s fair about this World Cup?

Certainly not the USA of course.  Their star striker Folarin Balogun got sent off in the last round and banned for a game, as is always the case after a red card. The challenge itself was very similar to the one Messi got away with in Argentina’s first game. Someone made use of Donald Trump’s allotted ten minutes of sanity per day and gets him to call his old mate Gianni, who suspends the suspension for a year, as you do. What’s good for Ronaldo is good for some random American. I don’t know what the official grounds were – I’m not sure there were any. It’s so ridiculous and the funny thing is, it’s not even a surprise. Trump then brags about it when he’s slightly less sane and is in one of his ‘no filter’ moments.  So, FIFA can’t intervene when one of their referees is banned from entering the country, but they can when Trump phones up because America gets a subjective bad decision. OK then. The formerly repected Mauricio Pochettino thought this was all fine with it and managed to do some mental gymnastics to justify it.

Meanwhile, Belgium, who were playing the USA next, were not happy but “America… Fuck Yeah”.  The tournament was always going to be tainted by Trump at some point but I didn’t expect it to be this obvious.  And then Belgium, backed by everyone outside of the US, smashed the Balogun led USA 4-1 and Romelu Lukaku did the Trump dance on the pitch.  Hilarious. Mexico and the USA’s departure, meant they joined Canada in co-host jail as they bombed out 3-0 to Morocco. Jesse Marsch went full performative emotional dickhead at the end.

England knew they weren’t playing Brazil in the Quarters, because they’d been knocked out by Norway and Erling Haaland. People have a certain age remember those brilliant Brazil sides but now they are pretty average and those famous yellow shirts gets them through games as much as the players do. I exclude Vinicius Junior from their otherwise squad of the very average. Brazil’s neighbours Argentina used another referee pass to get past Egypt. Egypt at the end of the day, shat the bed because they were two goals ahead with 10 minutes to go and managed to lose but they had a goal disallowed at 1-0 when VAR found a way to go back about three years to find a minor Egyptian offence but didn’t do the same when Argentina scored their winning goal. It’s getting beyond a joke now.

Any support for Paraguay for beating Germany went out the window when the played France and were basically a bunch of animals, encouraged by a referee who didn’t book one Paraguayan player – not a single one.  Just how dirty do a team have to be for English fans to en-masse want France to win. Kylian Mbappe went up in every fair minded fans estimations by scoring the winner and then laughing at every Paraguayan attempt to kick the shit out of him. Afterwards he called out a racist remark by some Paraguayan politician and she then demanded an apology for him pointing it out.

Quarter-Finals

So, England in the last eight, all the hosts are out and from now, FIFA and America will find it harder to ruin the World Cup but I’m sure they’ll try. Even after England’s mega-win in Mexico – if anyone other than France or Spain wins it, I will be amazed.  If the corruption continues however, put some money on and Argentina v USA final as the Americans are reinstated by a Trump royal decree, with Messi getting a hat-trick and USA winning 3-0.

Anyhow, the quarter-finals bought nothing remarkable with all the favourites getting through. Jude Bellingham single-handedly bundled England past Norway and into a semi final against FIFArgentina, who were once again struggling against Switzerland until the referee decided to find a way to send off a Swiss player for diving. It was the right call but the way he got to the decision was bullshit. France and Spain got past Morocco and Belgium without too much difficulty.

Hey Jude – he scored both against Norway, to add to the four he’d already scored in the previous games. Craig Hope is a Daily Mail journalist. He went on a little crusade against Jude in the build-up, with the narrative that he shouldn’t even go to the tournament. Only Craig knows why but for now he’s not saying and I doubt he will. Poor old Craig has gone to ground on the subject as every football media outlet in the country has given him absolute pelters. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. As a Southampton fan, the backlash was amusing, given Hope’s very enthusiastic coverage of Middlesbrough’s angle during Spygate.

Semi-Finals

Well, first of all, the ridiculously easy French progress was brutally halted by Spain who gave an object lesson in how a good team will beat any good bunch of individuals. Basically, the Spanish defensive structure meant we never saw any of the brilliant France individuals and the Spanish progressed to the final. One day later it was time for England to play Argentina…. And a cut long story short, Argentina were horrible bastards, the ref let them, we went ahead, had it in our hands and then we shat the bed and we fucking lost.

When all is said and done, when you look at England in the tournament as a whole, it was painfully familiar. Progress through the rounds until we play a genuinely top tier nation and then lose. Thomas Tuchel was bought in to “get us over the line“ and be the difference maker in these games but his idea of doing that was to spend half an hour camped on the edge of our own penalty area, allowing quite possibly the best creative player of the world has ever seen to do exactly what he wanted in our final third and either feed in passes or cross the ball into the box. The very definition of football suicide. That tactic works against Mexico and against Norway because of the end of the day, those two sides are quite limited and when they need a goal in the last 20 minutes, won’t do anything particularly creative. They will just arbitrarily throw the ball into the box and Dan Burn can head it away. Was that tactic ever gonna work against Lionel Messi? It seems unlikely and a manager of Tuchel’s experience really should’ve known that. He panicked and went early, putting all his eggs in one basket and once Argentina got the first goal, they were always going to get the second. Some panic substitutions to try and unpick the shambles of his own creation, left us with Ezri Konsa on the right wing, attempting to cross the ball into Dan Burn, who had been thrown up front at that point and Ivan Toney, playing his first minute of the tournament and first meaningful minutes against half decent opposition for two years.

When you play Argentina, of course the main thing you have to do is stop Messi from playing and the ridiculous thing is that for the first 65 minutes, we did that. Elliot Anderson rattled him early and you never saw Messi in that period of the game, get the ball and have any sort of space around him any time to pick his head up and get things moving. That was clearly the game plan from the start from England and then Tuchel thought, no, we’ll stop doing that and let him do what he wants. There were plenty of warning signs before the first goal but no stage did we try and get further up the pitch and we just kept trying to defend the edge of our own penalty area, with Messi now having the time and space tp dictate the tempo of the play at will.

We gave away a succession of corners on our left. Messi goes to take the corner and no one goes out to him which meant that the same move kept happening and it was hardly rocket science. Messi takes the corner short to the nearest Argentinian who gives it back, and he has all the time in the world to do what he wants to do, be cross it into the box with his left foot or skip round the player who eventually engages him and pass it to someone on the edge of the box, which is exactly what he did for horrible bastard Enzo Fernández to score the first goal.

Tuchel’s substitutions were negative in the extreme. Take off Anthony Gordon, our goal scorer and only genuine quick attacker and bring on Ezri Konsa – pacy left-winger for a right sided centre back, so of course, a massive reshuffle and deviation from the original game plan, that was working . Take off Declan Rice and bring on Dan Burn… a huge signal that we are only concerned about defending now, take off Reece James and bring on Nico O’Reilly, a right back for a left back, more disruption from the original game plan. Argentina and Scaloni on the other hand took off a defensive midfielder in Parades and brought on Gonzalez on the wing. They then took off a left back and brought on a central striker, Latauro Martinez who of course scored the winning goal. He scored the winning goal of course from Messi easily finding himself some space to cross the ball with his right foot and Martinez rose, behind the ballwatching Stones and was completely unmarked to simply nod it into the net. So, not stopping the cross and not marking the players in the middle. Football is a simple game.

The Argentinians of course celebrated their win in classy fashion, displaying a banner declaring that the Malvinas were Argentine. FIFA of course have rules against political messaging of any kind but I’d be willing to bet my fucking house that they won’t do anything about it whilst the tournament is in progress. Enzo Fernandez was a course front and centre, along with Christian Romero and Lisandro Martinez. Three players happy to play in England and take the money of course.

This game will be in training manual in years to come as to illustrate why you have to maintain an attacking threat. Argentina didn’t even have to think about keeping the back door shut and could solely focus on the attacking half of the pitch we had taken off our one forward player who could run so there was absolutely no danger of them conceding a second goal.

Tuchel will probably deny it but he didn’t have the options on the bench and everyone was be having an “I told you so” moment going right back to when the original squad was picked. The lack of midfield options, the lack of fullback options, the lack of game changing creative player. Hindsight is 2020 but it was pretty predictable that we were going to need a Cole Palmer, a Phil Foden or a Trent Alexander Arnold at some point. Trent? Bloody hell. And here we are with Ezri Konsa scudding over knee height crosses whilst we’re to one down in a World Cup semi-final.

There is no point in arguing as to which pathetic England tournament exit has been the worst of relatively this recent times. Meet the New Boss – Same as the Old Boss. Tuchel was bought in to replace Gareth Southgate and be a step up, but this was remarkably familiar to Southgate’s 2018 defeat to Croatia and the 2021 Euros defeat to Italy where in all cases, we took the lead and then didn’t have to belief to keep doing the things that had served us so well at the start of the game and we sounded the retreat. For the amount of money that we are paying Tuchel, we should expect better and we did expect better. Tuchel was supposed to be the difference maker but what we have is the same as we always have. England are flat track bully boys, winning games the virtually any manager could win because of the players they have at their disposal, and then we play someone half decent.

England’s exit was down to self sabotage at the end of the day. I’ve seen it said that it’s the most painful one ever and some people it will be. For me however, this is just the latest in a long line of poor World Cup exits. 2002 and lobbed Seaman and a passive nothing exit against Brazil’s ten men. 2006 and a Rooney red card and a penalty defeat to Portugal. 2010 and getting smashed by Germany, 2014 and Hodgson‘s England being the first team knocked out after just two group games, 2018 and the non-performance after going one up against Croatia and Southgate’s first semi-final, 2022 and Harry Kane putting in a penalty over the bar in a defeat against France – the first good team we played.

Bronze Medal Match

Yep, the game no one wants is now called the Bronze medal match instead of the Third Place Playoff. Regardless, it was an absolutely ridiculous game as France didn’t give a shit in the first half when they didn’t have the ball and England raced into a four goal lead.. France tried a bit in the second half and pulled it back to 4-3 before the teams exchanged more goals with England eventually winning 6-4. It was all a meaningless bit of good fun but nice for Bukayo Saka who got a hat-trick and for a few others who got some minutes. Ivan Toney proved why he should never have been selected for the initial squad.

World Cup Final 2026

And so the World Cup final 2026 was as American as it could possibly be. Irrelevant celebrities like Tom Cruise on the pitch beforehand, followed by 22 1/2 minutes of unpunished brutality by Argentina, then an advert break, then another 22 1/2 minutes of kick a Spaniard, then a halftime show for 25 minutes and so on. Absolute bullshit as FIFA, the supposed guardians of the game sell out a centuries worth of football traditions for the American dollar. Wayne Rooney went up in everyone’s estimations by calling the halftime show “crap“. It was curated by Chris Martin of Coldplay, who being English, really should have fucking known better. There’s another reason to hate him..

All we had in the second half was the Argentinians trying to boot and shithouse their way to a second successive World Cup win. Argentina continued to boot Spain all over the park and didn’t even have a shot on or off target until Spain scored in extra time with Ferran Torres saving football with what turned out to be the winning goal. Argentina then decided to try and attack and the son of Diego Simeone, another horrible little bastard, put their only chance over the bar.

Spain had been helped ultimately by that horrible little shit Enzo Fernandez putting in a challenge that even the most sympathetic of referees was going to have to give a second yellow card for. See you later fucker. What are the Malvinas?

We still had time for Argentinian psychopath Parades to start swinging haymakers at Spanish players after the game had finished and Otamendi, famous for mocking Dutch players after a penalty shootout win for Argentina in 2022, getting upset at Spanish players celebrating. They really are a horrible bunch of fuckers, In amongst it all, Lionel Messi cried, probably after his pathetic attempt to get Cuccurella sent off didn’t work, and so did the manager Scaloni, who knows he must leave now or try and build a team that doesn’t have Messi’s genius in it.

Spain collected the trophy, Argentina turned their backs, Donald Trump got in the way and Rodri had to shove him off to the side before they could lift the trophy. They even edited him and Infantino out of the celebration photographs on the official Spanish football website. If only everyone could do that.