SPECTATOR SPORT
Missing out
Frank Keating
SANE observers are mighty relieved at England's almost certain failure to qualify for next year's World Cup soccer finals in the United States. If 'heavy-handed' Dutch police did over-react last week in Rotter- d.am am by deporting the horde of English Imbeciles, then jolly good for the Dutch police.
Excellent effort, too, by the German ref- eree in denying England a penalty which conceivably could have swung the match. All the gortnless representatives of the Football Association could manage at the end was a complaint about that decision, the usual abdication of any responsibility whatsoever about the mindless morons in Union Jack underpants — 'nothing to do with us, guy, honest' — and an immediate and shameless wringing of hands about the vast booty in lost sponsorship which will result in elimination from next year's tour- nament.
No remote mention that Holland had a Perfectly good goal disallowed. Nor that by far the better team had won. You want to weep — and not so much for the aimless hooligan youth of England, but for the blazered lost leaders of its national game.
Still, the good news is that Wales and the Republic of Ireland retain a reasonable chance of crossing the pond for the finals next year. Each must win their final quali- fiers next month. The sound of broken glass and skulls is not music to their supporters. To be sure, the behaviour of the Irish in Italy's 1990 finals was so exemplary as to be utterly joyous.
A powerfully ironic editorial in the Chicago Reader last year was thinking not Irish but solely English. It was a warning to the obliviously unsuspecting folks of Chica- go, which stages the opening ceremonies next June at the Soldier Field stadium as well as five World Cup matches. It was headlined 'Hooligans at the Gate': Dust off the habeas corpus, Chicago — com- pany's coming. To local innkeepers, sociolo- gists and bail bondsmen, a World Cup here offers a rare chance to practice their trades in a new and exciting setting. World Cups are to
soccer hooligans what Woodstock was to hip- pies. World Cup '94 will give hooligans every- where a chance to visit, at bargain charter rates, one of the modern West's historic cen- tres of civic violence . . . the Chicago of Jay- market Square and the Pullman Strike, the King assassination riots and the 1968 Demo- cratic Convention. Yep, World Cup '94 will show old Chicago still knows how to have a really good time.
Now, without England, mercifully and certainly Chicago can.
In purely footballing areas, England blew it for want of any remotely coherent strate- gy that had the manager dithering for three whole years over which was his best team, let alone its best deployment. He was still experimenting to the very last. Crazy. In this time he wantonly snubbed into retire- ment expert and experienced players like Robson, Lineker, and Beardsley. Qualify- ing might have been a doddle had he dared to build around Waddle or Hoddle. The manager seemed unsure whether the sump- tuously talented but traumatised Gascoigne was temperamentally two shots short of a hat-trick. But the whole nation knew it.
As it knows, deep down, that England deserve to be missing out next year. For all manner of reasons.
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