Whitfield C. - BALLS! The Best European Football Nations

BALLS!

The Best European Football Nations

By Chris Whitfield

Published by Sedbergh Publishing at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Chris Whitfield

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Althoughthis is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of theauthor, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed forcommercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book,please encourage your friends to download their own copy atSmashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by thisauthor. Thank you for your support.

Dedicated to Gill for the idea.

I would like to emphasise that any resemblance to onehundred per cent accuracy and reasonable opinion within these pagesis purely co-incidental.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

BALLS! - The Best European Football Nations

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They say Football is the beautiful game,though that is a bit of a stretch for the imagination when you arewatching Dobrudzha Dobrich v Chernomorets Pomorie in the BulgarianB League. They also say that football is the beautiful game becauseof its simplicity, a factor reinforced every time the mediainterview an English footballer to bring further resonance to theword simple. And they say football is beautiful due to the scarcityof goals, though tell that to the Hartlepool United diehards whocelebrated News Years Eve in 1992 not knowing their team was aboutto embark upon an eleven game streak without scoring. Whatever thetrue reason for its deserved tag, it is irrelevant. If bitten bythe football bug, you are infected for life, and you do not want acure.

Football is particularly important to themale gender. The ever-increasing participation of women asspectators and players is a wonderful thing for the game and is tobe embraced with the vigour of a dog on heat. However, our creatorblessed the female with a natural ability to converse with ease andto engage people at an emotional level. If the average man did nothave football as an outlet, there would be nothing about which totalk. I have worked with guys where one hundred per cent of ourconversation - aside from a query about an outstanding invoice topay - has been on football. Five minutes with his new femalecolleague and she knows more about me than a bloke I have known fortwenty years. He thinks I never knew you had kids. For a hugeproportion of the male population, the beautiful game is theconversational glue that holds such relationships together,satisfying some deep tribal need to belong to a gang. It is the onearena in life where the male lets emotions run free, and of course,we take it all far too seriously.

Part of the obsession is not being able toget enough. We now live in a 24-7 multi-channel society in whichthere should be enough football related material to satisfy themost addictive personalities, but we still crave more. If there istwo hours of pre-match build-up to a game, we watch our TVs somehowexpecting a new revelation or eye-opening angle to proceedings.Yet, there is not one pundit, expert summariser, commentator,manager, player or ex-player with anything new to say. It has allbeen said before, and still we come back for extra helpings.

The greatest shot in the arm for any footballfanatic occurs every other year with the finals of either the FIFAWorld Cup or the UEFA European Championship. This is the highlightof soccers calendar and if your country qualifies, it triggerseight or nine months of acute anticipation. This builds to a frenzyin the month or so before the first game of the finals, and wecollect the petrol station coins, the Panini stickers, and theCorinthian football figures. We fly flags from our cars, ourwindows and, in the case of the over-enthusiastic, from the dogsarse. We buy the wall charts; enter the football sweeps and thefantasy football competitions. We get the preview magazines, thenewspaper specials and the old programmes. We watch re-runs ofprevious tournaments, qualifying game highlights and preview shows.We eat, drink, inhale and ingest whatever we can, whenever we can,all in the hope that this time, glory is just around the corner. Ofcourse, its not. It never is. Still, the football fan is theoptimists optimist and so realism is relegated to a dormant role,only coming to life when the inevitable occurs and the fan is indespair.

This chunk of football fare gives you apotted history for each of the sixteen teams that competed at the2012 Euros, the cream of the European crop. My hope is that thisread will offer something a bit different. Alan Hansen, GaryLineker and Alan Shearer never discussed the pivotal role GeneralFranco played in making the Spanish football team the mosttechnically adept group of players in the history of the game. Andnor did Adrian Chiles, Jamie Carragher and Roy Keane spend muchtime discussing the standard of the refereeing at the 1934 WorldCup Finals. But I will.

I have always had a recurring dream. I amplaying football at the highest level, usually Liverpool orEngland cue jokes about the relativity of highest. Being adream, there have been one or two unexpected twists and turns, suchas the Queen Mother playing in goal for the opposition and metaking to the field wearing no shorts or underpants, but the basicstend to be the same. Roared on by the crowd, I make a mazy dribbletowards the goal, and on some occasions, the ball bursts the backof the net to the deafening sound of fifty thousand cheers andexclamations. Then I wake up and I have pissed the bed withexcitement OK the latter happened only once but it left a mark, amark that Persil Automatic struggled to shift to be fair. Thepsychology of my recurring dream is simple. I still want to be afootballer. I am nearly fifty-six years old and as likely to forgea career in professional soccer as I am to invent a rocket thatwill send David Cameron and Nick Clegg into perpetual earth orbit -though I will continue to try - but my sub-conscious still yearnsfor a calling in the game, such is the power of the bug.

So I hope you enjoy this book, even those whoare nerds. You know who you are. Please accept my apologies for anyinaccuracies, though bear in mind this may be deliberate. Yes Iknow the European Championships was called the European Nations Cupin 1960 and 1964 and that it wasnt until 1996 that the Eurosterm was first used, but who gives a shit. Remember, this book is aload of Balls!

Chris Whitfield

July 2012

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World Cup Appearances: 7

World Cup Best: Semi-final - 1974, 1982

Euros Appearances: 2

Euros Best: Round 1 2008, 2012

The Polish national football team is like apair of loons I used to own. They had a purple patch around aboutthe mid 1970s those concerned that I strutted the glam rock erawith a gaudy coloured crotch on display can rest assured that the patch covered the splitknee. Yet a review of the major tournament qualification record ofPoland shows only one appearance before 1974, and that was in 1938when they played a solitary match against Brazil in the firstround. Poland scored five goals, four from Wilimowski, the firstplayer ever to score four in a World Cup game. Unfortunately,Brazil hit six and the Poles were on the train home sooner than youcould say Time to prepare for a pending invasion courtesy of theFhrer.

The Polish Football Federation formed in 1919and the national team played their first game in 1921 againstHungary in Budapest, the match finishing in a 1-0 defeat. Theyappeared at the Olympics in 1924 and 1936 before their World Cupdebut, but with the Second World War intervening, it was not until1954 that they next entered the competition. The draw placed theteam in Group 7 along with Hungary, then the best team on theplanet. So how did the Polish team prepare for this challenge? Didthey compile a dossier on every member of the Hungarian squad? Didthey plan to do a man-to-man marking job on their key player,Ferenc Puskas? Or did they concentrate on their own game, perhapsformulating a winning, defensive strategy? The answers are no, no,and no. They actually thought, 'Hungary? Sod that for a bunch ofsoldiers, we're off!' The team withdrew, apparently under theinfluence of the Polish Ministry of Affairs, which contrary topopular opinion has nothing to do with a Ken Barlow visit to Warsawand Krakow.