Please, let’s have an Englishman this time (From Worcester News)

Please, let’s have an Englishman this time

3:27pm Friday 10th February 2012 in Read

SIR – As the role [Fabio] Capello vacates is that of the England football team manager, dare we finally hope for an Englishman to replace him?

All the lame excuses for employing yet another foreigner in the role amounted to nothing.

Where were the outstanding performances, the stunning victories?

As another well-known but long dead Englishman may have observed of the England team; they are a bunch of obscenely overpaid prima donnas, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I am not a football fan, I prefer watching rugby and cricket, but any so-called English team should be led by an Englishman.

We already have football teams that purport to be English club sides filled with foreigners, such as Arsenal for example.

Whenever another English club side plays them, they are actually playing the rest of the world – it’s ridiculous.

Even many club managers are foreign. It doesn’t quite have the same resonance when a manager is talking to the press about how “we are going to...etc”, when it is said in a heavily foreign accent, demonstrating he is clearly not one of the “we” he is talking about!

We should be proud to be English, and to be led by an Englishman, not scouring the world for any foreign substitute willing to take several million a year regardless of his actual ability.

We should have the courage to stand or fall on our own abilities, and instil the necessary pride in those who truly care what direction our sportsmen and women take on the world stage because those who lead us are actually invested in that future, not shipping out back to their own country when the contract is over.

WILL RICHARDS
Malvern