It may only be the day after the Premiership season finished but next season seems a long way off. Let’s start with Day One!
The dust may only just have settled on another wonderful Premiership season but I can?t help but feel the next one could well feel like decades away.
It?s almost ironic that on the day those who follow the sound of leather on willow should be adjusting to the slower pace of life we find the heavens have opened. Perhaps the passing of yet another great football season is being mourned?
Nevertheless, this close season promises to be unlike any other, expectation levels are, on a national level, at an all time high. England, my beloved England! A country being touted as a possible World Cup winner ending a forty year hiatus to lift the ultimate international accolade. Or are we just getting carried away (again)?
Today?s the day that Sven names his provisional twenty-seven man squad, a time when emotions, for those involved, can be at an all time high or an all time low. Expectations levels and blind ambition destroyed in a fleeting moment, a moment that perhaps many may never get the chance to experience again.
Thankfully, four of the Chelsea five made the first cut – John Terry, Frank Lampard, Joe Cole and Wayne Bridge. The final cull comes a little later when the gallant twenty-seven are trimmed down to the hardy twenty-three English gladiators who?ll carry the torch for our country.
You cannot help but feel the torture those on the fringes are going through, would it have been kinder not have made the initial twenty-seven, is not the exclusion of four more, at a later date, something akin to reality television? Now that?s an idea! Let?s all have a vote, the cash raised could help out those who run the game from desk tops in Soho Square but seem to do so with a strange air of inadequacy.
Should Sven still be in charge? In the normal world would the working man care about the next few weeks if he were out of the door, would he give it his all, or would he simply cruise through his remaining few days?
Unfortunately, football isn?t normal anymore, it doesn?t belong to the working man, it was hijacked long ago by the corporate clientele, the television companies and anyone else who can assist in paying the exorbitant money associated with the game.
But then again does my opinion ever count for anything?
More tomorrow.