England expects...the worst.

Now I guess I shall have to come clean - this blog is about football and specifically England's Euro 2012 prospects. Now before all of you who hate football groan and decide not to bother reading it, all I can say is, bear with me. It will not be in the style of some pundit advising on tactics and which players Roy Hodgson should pick (he's the England manager for the really uninitiated). There's plenty of that gubbins in the newspaper.

Instead I thought I would take a light-hearted look at what is really likely to happen, and how we as a country are likely to react. By doing this I will do my bit to help England - as my doom and gloom predictions may be just what is needed to inspire them to tournament glory - just to prove me wrong.

Basically every two years we have either the World Cup or the European Championships - both of which England have a long history of failure in. This year it's the Euros, not quite as big as the World Cup but big nonetheless. Not as big as usual though - it seems people aren't as interested this year as in previous years - perhaps everyone has finally accepted that we are crap and resigned themselves to the inevitable failure.

Here is what I think will happen.

England will struggle through their first two group games, scraping either unconvincing 1-0 wins or drawing. The media such as the Sun will slag them off and have a go at the manager over whatever the hot issue of the day is e.g. "Why didn't he take Rio Ferdinand?" etc etc and everyone else will be moaning and groaning.

Then suddenly they'll get it all together for the third game and produce a solid win, meaning they qualify for the quarter finals - for a few days everyone will go football crazy, The Sun will be screaming "get behind our boys", England flags will appear everywhere, people will start to have conversations in pubs along the lines of "I really think we could do it this time".

Then quarter final day will dawn and before the end of the day we will be out down to some controversial incident or other - such as in the examples below:

1986 - and the infamous "Hand of God"

1998 - Beckham - what are you doing?

2004 - Rooney crocked.

2010 - GOAL!!! Ermmm...no it isn't.

Either that or we'll just go out on penalties as usual...

1990 - the first of many penalty shoot out failures.

It can't have escaped most people's attention that most of these incidents seem to occur against either Argentina or Germany - two countries that we just happened to have history with on other fronts - this of course just inflames the national media all the more. In the days following the defeat the usual predictable comments come out, "the players weren't hungry enough, they are paid too much" etc etc etc.

Basically, lets face it we're crap. But - even crap teams can win things - with a bit of luck. Sadly we are also unlucky. I wonder what controversial disaster the footballing gods are preparing for England this year?

We can't win Eurovision. We can't win this either. What's next up? - oh yes, Wimbledon, say no more...

Looking on the bright side there's no Argentina in this tournament and Germany are in the other half of the draw so we can't meet them until the semi finals at the earliest - which we won't reach, so at least we will be spared any more pain from either of them. Instead it looks likely that it will be Spain, Italy or Croatia who will inflict the agony this time round - assuming we get out of the group, which is by no means certain.

Not long now until we find out - the kick off vs France takes place at 5pm this afternoon...

Enjoy the match!

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Jason xx