Poland Here We Come! (without Rooney…)

So England are through to the Euros – eventually. Great, another competition where we can get all happy about our chances before falling flat on our faces in front of the entire continent. However good we are next June, it should be a great tournament. Germany, Italy, Holland and Spain are all through already, so England will have to work bloody hard if they want to win it. Seriously, if they struggle to see out results like tonight (albeit against a very promising new nation in Montenegro), I think we may suffer the same disappointment as we do every 2-4 years.

Rooney won't be getting his hands on this, even if we win it!

Before the game, spirits were high. I was, for once, quite confident about a decent England result. We had a full strength side, and they rested players for their next game. Everything was pointing towards a comfortable England victory. All was well.

But as we all know, it didn’t quite all go according to plan. The first let-down from the team was several failures to sing the national anthem. Wayne Rooney, who is ironically a constant talker of much nonsense online, couldn’t muster enough energy to open his lips to sing for our nation. Ah, well, it’s not his fault – he probably doesn’t know the words yet. Oddly enough, however, his United teammate Ashley Young also had the same difficulties. Is this a Man. United thing? Do they think they have double standards or something, just because they’re top of the league? It wasn’t much surprise when other teammate Rio Ferdinand leaped to their defence on Twitter.

Mind you, I wouldn’t blame the Montenegro players for not singing their own! It sounded like an entrance for the Grim Reaper!  Ooh, was that a bit harsh? I did feel slightly bad when I wrote that… Never mind – they’re probably so happy right now they won’t notice it – did you see the celebrations at the end? It was like they just avoided relegation!

I’m not sure if this is a positive or a negative, but what we learned today is that England only have to play well for about half an hour to get a result. It irritates me why they can’t play at a consistent level for 90 minutes. We played 15 good minutes at Wales and got 3 points. We played one half of brilliant stuff against Bulgaria last time and then shut up shop for no good reason. And then tonight, we played 30-40 minutes of football that Spain would be proud of and then, thanks to Wayne Rooney, we could easily have collapsed.

I wasn’t worried about their first goal. There was no reason to. They played some clever football, you could see it was coming, it’s just a shame we couldn’t make it to half time with a clean sheet. I thought we could get another goal to seal it. Everything was quite relaxed; the defence was solid and Joe Hart is keeping up a good record and he’ll be our No1 in Poland and Ukraine, no doubt. Everything was going swimmingly…

And then that moron decides to botch our chances in the tournament before we’ve had time to celebrate.

Once a thug, always a thug?

What the hell is wrong with him? And for that matter, his family? Maybe it was having an effect on him after all, although if I was him, I would half expect my dad to be in jail every now and then. The sending off means he’s out for one game at the finals – at least. I wouldn’t be surprised to see UEFA extend the ban to three games for a kick like that, especially with Michel Platini at the helm, I think he hates the English for some reason.

If they are brave enough, unlike the FA, to carry out that punishment (remember that elbow v Wigan last season?), he’ll be out for the entire group stage. What will be the point of taking him to Poland, then? Is Capello going to be that naïve to waste a place in his squad just so he can use him IF we get through the groups? Remember, there’s only 16 teams in the tournament, we’re bound to have tough opposition in there before the knockout stages - the Group of Death last time was well and truly deadly. I would be quite annoyed to find Capello denies a player Theo Walcott-style for the expense of that mindless thug. Hopefully he can get injured without us having to pray on his fitness like last time.

In the end, I didn’t celebrate, it was too difficult. Especially when the team was rather deservedly pegged back for the satisfactory draw we needed against a stubborn Montenegro side, and our ‘star’ striker is out for half the tournament. Thanks a lot, Wayne. On the bright side, though, at least we can look forward to seeing our team crash out of the cup on penalties in the quarters, again.

Come On England!