Dear England
May I first of all congratulate you on reaching the European Championship Quarter Finals, which I understand and appreciate is generally viewed as a considerable achievement in its own right. At the same time, of course, I offer you my sincere commiserations on the result of this match, which, in the context of past experience, can't have come as a great surprise, but must have irked nonetheless.
I am no great expert on, or follower of, football, but while doing some mundane chores, which commanded only part of my attention, I happened to have the television on in the background and found myself catching some of your game against Italy, and I couldn't help but notice that you appeared to be missing a few tricks here and there:
- First and most fundamental perhaps, I was puzzled by your general attitude to the ball. You seem to be treating it like some near-alien object, almost as if it were lethally, perhaps radioactively, contaminated, to the extent that you must keep it away from you at all cost. This results in a comical prancing around with your arms flailing in the air while attempting to control the ball with your torsos, butting it with your heads and occasionally flicking it with your feet. Why not pick up the ball and
run with it? That would be the obvious thing to do. Your hands are your most precise instruments by far and clutching the ball to your body instead of pushing it away from you all the time will give you great control when you are in possession of it. Of course, your game is called 'football', and so you want to be using your feet to their full potential. There is no reason why you shouldn't be able to do so still. In fact, launching the ball across the pitch - as I believe you call it - with a sturdy kick can be most effective. But passing it between members of your own team and preventing members of the opposite team from snatching it is infinitely more accurate and successful if you just chuck it to each other, ideally in the reverse direction of play. You will find your game instantly becomes a lot more interesting and also you will cease getting your legs tangled up in clumsy knots and banging your heads against each other in collisions that are obviously bad for your brains.
- Speaking of collisions: you are vying with your competitors for a ball on a playing field. There are going to be occasions when you bump into each other. Why you should act surprised and hurt when this happens is beyond me. (I realise you are by no means the worst offenders in this farcical practice: your Italian counterparts clearly take the biscuit when it comes to ludicrous theatrics.) I have seen grown men throw themselves to the ground clasping entirely the wrong part of their body with expressions of wild agony on their faces that would have made Laurence Olivier blush (and he was not known for the art of understatement). This is the kind of behaviour one might expect from a five year old girl, although one wouldn't tolerate it. In a professional sportsman it's embarrassing. When a man tackles you and knocks you to the ground in the process you get up and get on with the game. That's what you're paid for. Leave the amateur dramatics to the kids at the school play.
- Adopting a more robust and honest conduct on the field will free up your game considerably: as long as you keep falling over because your opponent breathes on you, they in turn will be able to do the same thing when you as much as look at them. The moment you man up and stop this petulance, you will rob the other side of their excuse and so you can in turn tackle them properly. Immediately, everything flows and the referee can stop flagging up coloured cards every few minutes as if he were a human traffic light with the 'go' signal missing. Unless you have a broken bone or a gashing wound with unstoppable bleeding, you may consider yourself fit to play.
- I noted that you restrict your scoring to the ball entering the goal, in front of which you've positioned a goal-keeper. No wonder your games end nil-nil. Not only are you wasting a fine team member by keeping him glued to the spot, you're also misinterpreting the purpose of the exercise, which is to get the ball across the opponent team's touch line. It doesn't matter where. You may, if you wish, make the game more sophisticated, by awarding, instead of, say, one point only for a successful score, several points, and there is no reason why you shouldn't then use the goal to, for example, allow a player to gain extra points for the team by aiming a shot directly at it from roughly the position on the pitch that corresponds to where the ball crossed the line. (This tends to be more elegant if you open your goal up a bit by extending the vertical posts. You don't really need a net.) Once you cotton on to this principle, you will realise that it livens up proceedings enormously, and very rarely will you end up with an even score, so you will no longer have to go through the agony of losing so called 'penalty' shootouts, which amount to much the same as a lottery; you may as well determine the outcome of your major tournaments by drawing straws or sending rubber ducks down the river.
- On the subject of wasting men: you keep an extraordinary number of people sitting around on the benches. Is that necessary? More to the point, is it wise? My recommendation would be to bring on maybe four more chaps and get them involved right from the start. That way there is less danger of them getting bored or being so stiff by the time they come on, they keep rolling around the grass with cramp, which just looks unattractive. You have the manpower there, why not use it?
I trust you will find these ways of improving your game worth implementing. I should caution you perhaps that they are a touch more demanding than your current method, and so you will genuinely tire sooner. This is nothing to be ashamed of. You are now using your arms as well as your legs and your head is now freed up to do some thinking, all of which can be exhausting. So by all means feel free to reduce your playing time from the current ninety minutes, to maybe eighty: the amount of extra enjoyment both you and your spectators get out of your game more than compensates for its slightly shorter duration.
Oh and you may wish to consider changing your ball. The ball you are currently kicking about is the kind of toy children use in the playground. It's round and so it rolls and flies in all directions without distinction. Once you proceed to the stage of professional football, you should really graduate to something a little more taxing, such as an egg-shape (or, more appropriately, a testicle shape). The skill and precision involved in kicking such a ball is highly advanced, so it will require some practice, but the rewards are compelling: once you've mastered the technique you will be able to measure up against the strongest, fastest, most decidedly dextrous, most manly and magnificent sportsmen in the world and as a result earn the respect of your country whilst commanding awe and admiration across the globe. What you have been playing up until now will seem nothing but an absurdly primitive prototype of a sport that has, with its evolved facets, layers, positions and phases, the potential truly to inspire.
With all good wishes for your future in football
Sebastian
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