Stop Football, Start Holidays!

Hello readers. It’s Monday 13 June, the sun is shining, the bees are buzzing, the sound of leather on willow is ringing around local parks and *Fiver checks fixture list* the football season still hasn’t effing finished! Yes, by the time you read this, Kazakhstan v Slovakia will be seamlessly rolling into Azerbaijan v Belarus in a Nations League C3 double-header whose main use appears to be helping us fill our word count. There are more matches later on too but, to be honest with you, we’re about as keen to check them as England and Italy players appeared to be about entertaining a crowd of 2,000 schoolchildren at Molineux on Saturday. That tired and tepid encounter predictably ended 0-0, the highlight of which was the high-pitched booing at full-time – proof that the next generation of English crowds with a sense of entitlement is safe and well.

“There’s been a little bit of a lack of sharpness in [attacking] areas across the three matches,” sniffed Gareth Southgate afterwards, as his groaning players crawled back to their beds to prepare for another game against Hungary. To be fair to Southgate and other sensible managers around Europe, some overworked squad members have not been force-fed the overcooked four-course Nations League meal. But in a year when the domestic European season is kicking off early to clear space for a controversial World Cup earmarked as a winter edition for just the seven long years, Uefa might have thought harder about how to schedule its most pointless tournament [yeah, we’re actually digging Tin Pot – Fiver Ed]. Mind you, some of their bigwigs do tend to go missing when they have important things to sort out.

“It’s bonkers,” fumed Wales manager Rob Page when asked about the schedule. “A lot