It's a banner week for football in England. Tottenham Hotspur won their Champions League tilt in Moscow. The champions of England, Leicester City, have two wins in two tries in the competition. Arsenal, sans Olivier Giroud, have a winnable home game against FC Basel while Manchester City have yet to lose under the great Pep Guardiola as they travel to Glasgow to face once-mighty Celtic.
Of course, no one is England is talking about this or about Thursday's huge match at Old Trafford, where Manchester United look to maintain their unbeaten home mark against Ukrainian opposition. That's because, once again, England's national team has humiliated the country - this time without even taking the pitch.
Now people come up to The Phantom all the time on the street (like U.S. captain Michael Bradley) and accuse yours truly of being too hard on England. Well the defense rests after Tuesday's utterly ridiculous announcement that England boss Sam Allardyce has been let go after one match in charge.
It is this blogger's opinion that maybe Allardyce - a victim of a sting operation by tabloid rag Daily Telegraph - didn't deserve to go. But does it really matter? We couldn't make sense of the whole situation and while his comments about Roy Hodgson and Gary Neville have drawn plenty of heat, his words about having to pay taxes only echo what every overpaid rich person in every Western nation claims.
In any case, this is proof that being England manager is the Impossible Job the nation claims it is and mostly because you can expect folly like this if you accept it. Not that we are into willy-nilly nationalism or patriotism but shouldn't publications - even hack operations like the Telegraph - not go after the manager of the national team? The answer is yes but the reason it happens is not just because the tabloids are out of control but also because the culture in England has gone to the shitter to such an extent that the public deep down believes in such gutter muckraking. It's why Allardyce is bitching about his taxes and the idiots over there voted for Brexit. England - and its people - have struggled to take responsibility on many an occasion, resulting in a general distrust that creates an atmosphere of chaos. It's what they do. It's not surprising that an Englishman wrote the famous play Betrayal since the Brits have truly made that into an art - literally.
So where does England go from here? The truth is it doesn't matter for the "laughing stock of world football." Last year, Leicester shocked the world by winning the Premier League. From our vantage point, it will be a bigger shock if the next England manager doesn't wet himself.
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