Excuse the nationwide apathy towards England’s World Cup qualification but we’ve seen this all before.
The team makes it through their qualifying group unbeaten only to crash out in the group stages, last 16, or best-case scenario quarter-finals, of the tournament proper.
There’s no way a round-robin with the likes of the smaller nations involved in qualifying can prepare the Three Lions for a high-pressure knock-out clash with a heavyweight when it comes to Russia.
Between tournaments, England’s only exposure to big teams is through sporadic friendlies, the results of which, like qualifiers against minnows, are of no real bearing.
Players hardly even have to get out of first gear in qualifiers or friendlies, so when they get into a tournament they are decidedly undercooked.
Of course, every team is up against the same problem, and it hasn’t hurt the last three World Cup winners Italy, Spain and Germany, who were all from Europe.
England’s problem is more to do with a lack of talent coming through, or being granted game time at their clubs in the foreign-player obsessed Premier League — another reason England fans aren’t holding their breathe.
Two weeks before the tournament the English press and public will be overblowing the team’s chances, but until then England qualifying is very much a footnote in the daily news. To be expected given the circumstances.
This aside, there has to be a way of making qualification more competitive and thus more palatable for the viewer, because let’s face it, there’s no fun, or point, in routinely and unsurprisingly beating smaller nations. No one’s watching, no one cares and there’s already too much football on TV.
You could just make the Euros bigger and then hand World Cup spots to the top finishing teams, getting it all done in one summer and limiting the need to break domestic league rhythm with endless international breaks. But that would limit playing opportunities during the two years until the next World Cup, and exacerbate the issue of teams coming into a major tournament undercooked. Or would it? They might even be more refreshed for a big tournament with 10 pointless games having been taken out of the equation.
The other option is just to adapt the current system, holding games in the summer before a World Cup year out of league time, so as not to disrupt the domestic system. On top of that they should whittle down the process so that smaller teams in the world rankings have to go through more preliminary vetting rounds of qualification before they are lumped in with the bigger teams. Groups could also be less, with more teams from each group going through, to increase the likelihood of bigger teams meeting more often, thus making the whole spectacle, just that, a spectacle, instead of a dull formality.
