England must go to Rio

The immediate future of the England football team hangs in the balance at the mercy of their next two matches. If the Three Lions do not successfully negotiate their way through a tricky couple of World Cup qualifiers against Montenegro and Poland, the national game will sink to a new low and there are question marks about how it would recover.

Not playing in Rio would be catastrophic for the country. Not just for the futures of the players and coaching staff, failure to qualify for the biggest event in the calendar next year is unthinkable because of the wide range of consequences. Each and every level of English football will bleed by England’s absence from the World Cup.

The world’s greatest show will be held at what is rightfully considered the ‘home of the beautiful game’ next summer and it would a tragedy of humongous magnitude if the founders of the game were not able to secure their ticket to the party. The damage of not being invited to the summer’s biggest festival will bring irrevocable damage in terms of the perceptions of football in England, its reputation as well as long term development and it will be quite a while before the damage can be reversed. It is bad enough for English football to be considered in the second tier of footballing nations; and falling down to the third tier would surely be appalling.

It’s not hard to imagine what the talk will be if the results don’t go in England’s favor. People would talk about it being a ‘blessing in disguise’ which would allow the FA to take stock of the situation and start a rebuilding process from the grassroots level. That’s utter nonsense. There is absolutely silver lining if England fails to qualify for Brazil 2014.

The best place to start afresh is not among the audience while the others vie for the title; it’s from the world stage itself. English football must have one eye trained on the future – talk of youth development and reforms must be continued – but this must be done while England still has the knees to support it, not with the FA, the players and the supporters down on their knees in despair.

For a restructuring operation to be successful the atmosphere must be on that suit it and the doom and gloom it could face if it fails to qualify for the World Cup is not the one.

England has to qualify for Rio. Even if they fail miserably at the tournament proper, it is still better than not going there at all.

And amid all these talk about giving the young players a chance, we tend to forget that there are no players who can take the team by the scruff of its neck and turn it around. Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard are nearing the ends of the careers but where are the players at any age level capable of stepping into their shoes? Right, there aren’t any!

This is not the late 1990s and there is no golden generation waiting in the wings to grab their chance.

Perhaps the country’s best prospect, Everton’s Ross Barkley, is still quite a raw and needs a couple of seasons in the Premier League before England start to expect him to delivering in international matches. He is definitely not ready to be the focal point of an England starting XI at this point.

In the context of the future of English football, the next two fixtures against Montenegro and Poland are the most important matches England has had in a long, long time.

It wouldn’t be the first time that England has failed to qualify for a World Cup, failing once in the 1970s and then in 1994 but the game has changed a lot since then and even then, people wouldn’t have looked at their failure as the end with no chance to recover.

England has a greater worry now because of the ridiculous shortage of English players in the Premier League or even in the lower leagues.

England definitely wouldn’t go to Brazil as one of the title contenders but there still will be some hope that they can spring a surprise or two. Every child in the country will be out on the streets with a ball during the summer festival and there is no greater motivation than seeing home grown heroes performing at the grandest stage of them all, making each and every youngster feel they, too, can live the dream.

You can win all the European Cups you can for your club but there is no greater joy, no greater pride in turning out at the World Cup for your country and if you manage to win it, you will etch your name in the history books forever.

For a footballer, the World Cup is the very pinnacle of one’s career and it is competition one dreams being a part of and being a World Cup winner eclipses everything else that life can offer.

Every player dreams of playing in the World Cup.

And it is the motivation of being there that drives a player to succeed. There is no way England will win the World Cup but there is almost no chance they will miss out of the tournament altogether.

And Roy Hodgson’s side must deliver for the sake of English football. If it doesn’t, it will be a very, very long road back to respectability.



DISCLAIMER: This article has been written by a member of the FootballWorld fraternity and represents the personal views of the writer and not of footballworld.co.in.
Posted by Subham Mitra on behalf of FootballWorld.