I wish I could get excited about the new football season. It starts next Saturday!!! And yet… and yet…

And yet as with so many things in this mid-Covid world, it is tainted. Diluted. Reduced. And as normally a person who not only has his glass ‘half full’, but always the top half at that, this whole Coronavirus has left me decidedly ‘half empty’.

Maybe, just maybe, once Spurs start losing silly matches, dropping needless points, wasting countless opportunities, I’ll realise what I’ve been missing and become engaged once again with the beautiful game. Maybe I’ll volunteer to help make the fake crowd noises. “COME ON YOU SPU-URSSSS”, etc…

But at the moment there is just no sport around. The cricket’s resting, the golf is no more a sport than the return of parliament and the tennis is… over there. So its the perfect time to stage some international football matches. Because if there’s any other sport on tv normally during such games, then I’d watch that. But in the total absence, it gives England a chance to have some well-earned reluctant and apathetic support.

And we beat Iceland 1-nil (a penalty) on Sunday in the European qualifier. Brilliant. Iceland has a population of just over 1 million people. But the problem is that many of them look like those pictured above. That’s not the problem with the match itself, those canny Scandinavian team selectors generally pick the team who don’t at all look like those. The problem is after the match. When the team has to return to its extended ‘bubble’. A term which was meaningless until June 2020. And there must they stay. Team-mates. Hotel staff. Masks, gloves, screens, hand-sanitiser. All good, clean and SAFE.

Yet two of our team, two young’uns just playing their national team debuts, decided two-nilaterally (like ‘unilaterally’ but with 2 of ’em), that the benefits of spending quality time with these two Scandi-babes of Abba-esque proportions, was worth a bit of a risk. I won’t ‘name and shame’ because its embarrassing for both Mason Greenwood and Phil Foden, so I’ll keep them out of it. But faced with the choice between a ‘sure thing’ and the safety and security of their entire team, country, the whole fucking world in its battle against a pandemic and their future careers, they did what any man would do. It was never really in any doubt.

Both now sent home with their heads hung low. Mainly because they’re probably still smiling.
Happy daze
A xxxx