I Got You, AVB

Let's face it: life is but a series of repetitions. Each day begins with a shrieking alarm call callously ripping us from our merry dream worlds, the jarring prelude to gazing vacantly at the ceiling for as long as our snooze button will allow us. From there it’s onto the bathroom to tease a few drops of hot water from the shower before huddling foetus-like against the cold tiles, the nozzle’s cascade merging with our weary tears. Then it’s off to work – tea, emails, fag breaks, phone calls, lunch, more emails, home, dinner. Day in, day out. Work, sleep, rinse, repeat.

But then comes the heady relief of the weekend – a forty-eight hour offering from the heavens when alarms are turned off and breakfast is regally feasted upon in the early afternoon, while the comfort blanket of football envelopes us like the arms of a long lost love, it's touch a cool balm for our workaday wounds.

When you look at things this way, it’s actually quite comforting to know that multi-gazillionaire Roman Abramovich leads much the same life that we do. He also knows only too well the soul-sapping drudgery of being trapped in a hopelessly replaying loop. For you see, Abramovich emerges daily into the kind of world Bill Murray strove so desperately to escape from in the harrowing metaphysical treatise Groundhog Day.

While Murray's world-weary TV weather anchor Phil Connors found himself marooned in a frosty netherworld somewhere between Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and the darkest depths of his own despair, Abramovich routinely awakens to the crushing realisation that he too is stuck in a forever-repeating realm of his own making; a closed-circuit, locked groove of an existence where managers are hired and fired without foresight or patience. His club's recent results – consecutive home humblings to Arsenal and Liverpool, the ill-tempered derby defeat to QPR, and a late Champions League reverse in Leverkusen – have left him staring into a familiar existential abyss.

The problem for Roman is that living each day in nothing more than a maddening temporal hiccup has taught him absolutely zip. Finding himself regularly disillusioned with his choice of manager, he just picks a new one, safe in the knowledge that should it all go Scolari-shaped he can just find himself a replacement and damn the consequences. But if quasi-sci-fi family films of yore have taught me anything (and you can be the judge of that) it's that all actions have consequences. And for Roman it's the same one – over and over and over again.

All of which has considerable knock-on repercussions for poor Andrés Villas-Boas. Just as Andie MacDowell's plucky producer Rita became an unwitting accomplice to Connors' never-ending existential farce, so young Villas-Boas is the latest individual to find himself sinking into Abramovich's unrelenting mental quagmire. Not four months ago he was an ambitious, über successful young manager, arriving in England with a host of trophies and a rather dashing line in five o'clock shadow. All of a sudden that Primeira Liga medal means very little indeed and that once rugged fizzog of his increasingly resembles the concept of 'hopelessness' as fashioned from dry timber by a psychopath.

The fact that some of his players are most definitely showing their age is perhaps the only sign that life on the King’s Road is proceeding in any sort of regular fashion at all. He still bounces up and down on the touchline like a frog dancing on hot coals, but this no longer feels like a show of raw enthusiasm but rather a display of shredded nerves, which is fair enough really, especially when you've been tasked with teaching David Luiz about the offside trap.

Others too have become unsuspecting characters in the Russian's perpetual motion nightmare. Take Fernando Torres. He was happy once, floating about Merseyside in a bubble of bonhomie, his lovely locks a-flowing, scoring wonderful goals with the regularity with which us normal folk break wind. But then he wandered too close to Roman's space/time continuum and now he is trapped, destined to fluff his lines in front of goal for the rest of his days. 

Such is the mighty power of Abramovich's all-consuming purgatorial orbit, I’m worried that eventually all of us will be sucked into it too, like nail clippings towards a Dyson. Maybe it's actually happened. Maybe our yesterday was merely an illusion. Maybe we are already ensnared, doomed to be little more than passers-by in a parallel world formed purely from the stubbornness of one man's mind. Really puts things into perspective, doesn't it?

But wait, for all is not lost. There is of course one man who can rescue Abramovich from his personal limbo, and that man is Abramovich himself. Connors broke the spell of repetition by examining his life and evaluating his faults, learning and growing and gradually becoming a better man; a more patient, tolerant and loving human being. For Chelsea to smash their hire-sack-hire curse, Abramovich needs to embrace change in a gargantuan fashion. It won't be easy, but if he pays attention to the script it is certainly doable.

He'll need to start by engaging a little more with the local community. He should let them keep their stadium for starters. After that he could pay a friendly visit to the pensioners or volunteer at a local junior school (or failing that, just buy the kids a new one). He should also start to feed the homeless, learn jazz piano and be prepared to perform the Heimlich Manoeuvre on choking diners.

Eventually these selfless deeds will trigger a change somewhere deep inside, opening his eyes to the folly of his ways, at last finding it in his heart to grant a manager the time and freedom to shape a team worthy of the supporter’s faith. And we should do everything we can to help. Next time you see him in the street, perform a simple act of kindness. Nothing that'll get you arrested for public indecency – just compliment him on his shoes or offer him a Minstrel. Show him what it's like to feel humanity's warm embrace. We must all be vigilant, or it won't just be six more weeks of winter we'll be facing, but a lifetime spent reliving the same fate, from one day to the next, for all eternity. As if we don't have enough of that already. 

~ Matt

International Rescue

“Coming up, England's first training session of the week – and we'll be there live!” Slouched in front of the TV, nursing a cold and contemplating a late breakfast, this was not the 11am Sky Sports News bulletin I was hoping for. “Join us as we watch John Terry go for a jog, Gareth Barry wiggle his hips about, and Jack Rodwell struggle with a bib so bright you could probably see it from space”, the reporter failed to add, although he might as well have, for that was as far as the coverage was allowed to go. As (training) pitch-side pundit Ray Parlour described how Gabby Agbonlahor will be settling back in nicely because he's mates with Darren Bent, a metaphorical media blackout was instigated, almost certainly for the good of Queen and country.

Any further coverage would have been akin to giving away state secrets. Good decision, if you ask me. Heaven only knows what could've happened if some crafty Spanish agent had snuck his way past security to snaffle crucial bits of information. He'd no doubt have scurried back to his Aston Martin, where at the push of a button he could have turned the dashboard into an HD video link to Spanish HQ, ready to brief Vincente del Bosque on James Milner's off-the-pace performance during the shuttle runs.

Let's be honest, the good people at Sky were desperately trying to inject a little tension, or even some mild interest, into the build up to England's upcoming friendlies with Spain and Sweden. Unfortunately, most of the drama surrounding England these days only involves ball-kicking in a metaphorical sense. Over the last fortnight we've watched with increasing despair as Terrygate (Version 2.0) and Poppyfarce have stolen the back pages, with very little copy produced for the matches themselves.

But shouldn't we be excited by these games? Spain, as we're all too aware, pretty much represent the zenith of footballing capability right now – world and European champions, home to a gleaming, apparently never-ending well of talent. Sweden, meanwhile, have been a constant, peripheral presence during my England-following life. Via Tomas Brolin's pop-inspiring strike at Euro 92, an epic six-goal thriller in 1995's Umbro Cup, a heated 2-1 reverse in a Euro 2000 qualifier and an opening World Cup encounter in Saitama in 2002, the Swedes have been a thorn in England's side for two decades now. By all logic, we should be looking forward to this double-header. But we're not, are we?

Such is the quality and supposed all-importance of the both the Premier and Champion's Leagues, international football is no longer the showcase for global footballing talent that it used to be. Dredge up your earliest memories of international football and you'll recall the magisterial brilliance of the likes of Baggio, Romario, Batistuta, Milla and Hagi – semi-mythical sporting beasts of whom we were permitted a fleeting glimpse every few years. International football had all-star appeal, the joy of watching a fantasy team of the best club parts assembled into one globe-trotting whole. Not so any more. We can watch Lionel Messi, Wesley Sneijder, David Silva or Cristiano Ronaldo just about any night of the week we like, and we can do so as they face each other in the increasingly insular Champions League.

Put simply, international football used to be the place to see the crème de la crème, and now it isn't. But that shouldn't really be enough to take it to the point it finds itself at now, a point where some would rather wait patiently for the international break to be over than actually engage with the games taking place.

So what's the problem? Well for one thing those fabled thirty years of hurt have become forty-one – seven more tournaments have come and gone with nothing better than a few quarter finals to show for it. Now I'm not for a minute arguing that England have any kind of right to be progressing to the finals of major tournaments, but I think some of our frustration comes from the disproportionate success of the English club game. The Premier League is marketed, marketed and marketed some more as the best domestic competition in the world, beamed directly into homes across hundreds of countries worldwide while the national team – in terms of skill and in terms of success – has gotten left behind.

The players found within the English top flight are among the most talked about, debated, hated and loved in the world. Furthermore, off-field dalliances now take on an aura of soap opera scandal, perpetuated by a modern media hungry for fresh meat in an age where the internet can make, break and conclude a story before the ink is dry on the traditional morning edition. Rich investors from across the globe have taken charge of clubs, bringing with them, in no particular order, star players, huge transfer fees, brand promotion and uncertain debt levels, upping the spotlight wattage further still. Drama, personalities, money and entertainment – a loopy cocktail that the international game just can't compete with.

Maybe it's also something to do with the people we are meant to be supporting when England take to the field. Every sport – nay, every walk of life – has it's pantomime villains, but when the lines between loyalty, rivalry and straight-up hatred become blurred, it's not always easy to cheer on that centre-forward who on any other weekend you'd be calling a money-grabbing, morally-vacuous shitheap.

The rivalry and revulsion between club supporters is plastered everywhere, played up to and encouraged by Sky and broadcasters at large, broadcasters who have comparatively little invested in the national game anyway, where a failure every two or four years isn't quite as lucrative as a Premier League season, where each May triumph is guaranteed for someone. It's understandable that, having been fed all this, a young Arsenal supporter may find it tricky to rekindle their affection for Ashley Cole, and likewise cheering on Wayne Rooney becomes quite the awkward chore for the Liverpool diehard. But perhaps the most telling emotion is the one that a growing number of football fans feel towards the spectacle of international competition – indifference.

So international football has multitudinous obstacles to overcome. It is no longer a looking-glass through which we can leap into a wonderland of foreign footballing wizardry, and it carries the weight of repeated failure on it's bruised shoulders. It seems that for many England supporters the conclusion is simple: we're fated to disappoint, so why bother getting excited in the first place? Of course, this does tend to change when the tournaments actually come around – a World Cup is still a World Cup, no matter how jaded folk feel towards the preceding friendlies and all the associated nonsense and non-stories.

But it's clear to me that some repairs need to be carried out. Each season someone raises the idea that we'd be better off reshaping the international calender, and this may be a good place to start. Why not set aside fewer longer periods wherein the majority of qualifiers can take place? A qualification triple-header, for instance, with nine points riding on it would not only eradicate much of the tiresome club-versus-country bickering, but could inculcate a sort of 'mini tournament' atmosphere too. What's more, the subsequent comparative scarcity of international breaks may make those occasions when friendlies do occur all the more enticing – an intriguing novelty rather than just another Wednesday night substitution-fest when we could be watching Barcelona pummel Dynamo Chernobyl to a pulp instead.

While we're at it, why not bring back 'B' Internationals? Play them in the same week, and let the coaching teams examine potential squad members first hand without diluting the appeal of the main fixture. Or perhaps we could introduce a Three Lions Lottery, where members of the public pay a fiver and if they're picked out of a hat (by Sir Trevor Brooking) they get to come on and play stoppage time? What a great way to reconnect the England team with the people!

Ah, I went too far didn't I? Maybe it's this darned cold making me all hot-brained. Or maybe I'm just bored – it is an international week after all.

~ Matt