A Football Earthquake

On the eve of England's visit to Israel for the 2008 qualifier the Israel press and players are claiming that if England fail to win it will be the equivalent of a footballing earthquake. To be honest I think most England supporters wouldn't be surprised if we lost. Since last summers World Cup the form of the squad has gone backwards and if you look at individual performances you could only say that Jamie Carragher, Rio, Force Field Frank, Stevie G and the boy Rooney have actually performed better.

International football has been treated as a second class act for most of the year, we only get excited when the big games come along, which is how it should be I suppose, but the performance of the team so far in this qualifying campaign hasn't done much to excite the fans.

Those five players I've mentioned need at least three more to be playing at the top of their game to give us a chance of qualifying of the missing players, Gary Neville, JT, Cashley, Owen Hargreaves and Twizzle have all been hit by injuries this season, Paul Robinson still isn't international class - to be honest I don't think he's even Premiership standard and we are struggling to find international let alone world class players.

It's funny but if you follow world football and see what players and the media overseas say about English football I think you'll see that the English media are finally waking up to the fact that we have one world class player in the national side (Stevie G) and two (Force Field and the boy Rooney) who have the potential to be world class. An exciting domestic league and success in Europe helped in the main (certainly for Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool - less so Man.Utd) by non-English players has papered over the cracks for too long.