Confessing Evangelical

Running the national football team is very much like running my group, the Fall ... We're friendly but the secret of it is never get too ally-pally. You can have a pint or two together now and again but you don't want to be going round their houses.

Mark E. Smith, lead singer of The Fall - one of my favourite bands, though perhaps not one to everybody's taste - shares his thoughts on the task awaiting Sven Goran Eriksson and the England team in this year's World Cup in an interview with the Guardian (which I strongly suspect was conducted in the public bar of a Manchester alehouse, as the afternoon wore on).

"You want a manager that's hard but not stupid", opines Smith, before going on to make rather a perceptive point about the failure of an England team packed with top-quality players to win any trophies:

The way the England team is now is ridiculous. A team of superstars is like a supergroup. It's like picking the best guitarist in Britain, the best drummer and the best singer, and expecting them to produce something that isn't prog-rock mush.

Smith's solution? Follow Alf Ramsay's lead - "He took players and moulded them, like I do with musicians", explains Smith - and pick a goalkeeper from a bottom-of-the-table club:

You want a goalie who gets bloody shot at every week! You don't want the Arsenal or Spurs goalie or whoever in any national team, because he's never got anything to do! He might pull off the occasional beautiful save, but he's never gonna be any good against a gang of Poles or whoever who know full well they're going to face the firing squad if they don't score.

Apologies to the nation of Poland, there.

Mind you, I'm strongly tempted to follow the example of Michael Henderson, who in a "heartfelt polemic" in this week's Observer explains why he is supporting Germany this time round (contrasting the "cultivated slumming" of England fans with the land of "Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Wagner and all those painters, writers, scientists and philosophers"). Except I can't quite shake off the hope (or possibly fear, given the decades-long national derangement it would cause) that we might just do it this time, and how stupid would I feel then?