World Cup Willies

Apart from the really dedicated fans, and the multinational community that live here, the World Cup is over and done with for another four years. Our team, so feted by the press before they left, have returned this morning, creeping into the country at sparrow fart, unsurprisingly without a reception to welcome them home.
The excuses will be made and the deep analysis will begin, millions of words will be written about why our national team was so deplorably bad and yet the truth of the matter is that fundamentally we are just not good enough. The rest of the world has improved and we have not.
England was once a major world player in more or less everything, but those days are long since gone and there are few fields in which we can claim to have some sort of lead. We are still there in the arts, and hanging on by the skin of our teeth in some aspects of technology, but sadly we no longer excel in very much at all.
We have become a society driven by greed and the desperate urge to acquire as much material wealth as possible whilst doing as little as possible to attain it. We are alcohol fuelled has beens, with a whole generation prepared to settle for poor standards in more or less everything and it is no wonder that so many prefer virtuality to reality. Thatcher's declaration that there is no such thing as society has borne fruit and with the CONDEMS in power, the fragmentation of what little remains will continue.
We need people to accept rewards that do not involve vast sums of money, job satisfaction should be a reward in itself and those that work should be paid a good living wage. Is a football player worth more than say a doctor or a policeman?
Our players have become vastly overpaid and overindulged, and like overfed animals they do not have the hunger to win. I'd like to see a world cup in which all the teams were comprised of amateur players. They would train together as a team and play together as a team, and although we may not see the dazzling individual performances of the likes of Messi or Ronaldo, we may see more sides either winning or losing as a team.