Morning:
8°c
It is hard to think of a more Loony Tunes idea than the Premier League's 'international round' and I can't imagine why as shrewd an individual as their chief executive Richard Scudamore has promoted it. The move can only damage his reputation.
First of all, this cunning plan fundamentally undermines the integrity of the League, which is based on every team playing each other twice, home and away.
Putting in a 39th match means every team will play one of the others three times, thereby distorting the competition and paving the way for endless wrangles about the basis on which who plays who in the international round.
It is also ludicrous when there is so much concern about player burn-out to cart them off to Sydney or Tokyo, and then expect first-class performances.
That's assuming these games will be allowed in either city.
Because it is another flaw in this grand design that little or no thought seems to have been given to the possibility that these matches might not be permitted by host associations, or that the whole circus would be so roundly denounced by FIFA and UEFA.
I am not even sure about the business sense of all this. Fans all over the world watch games on TV quite happily.
The fact that a small proportion of that TV audience will be able to see one match, almost certainly not involving the club they support, in their own backyard, seems to me to deliver a totally marginal commercial benefit, hardly worth all the blood, sweat and tears involved.
The only redeeming features of this scheme are, firstly, the way it has The round of smoked and useless smoked out UEFA's Michel Platini, whom I have always regarded as viscerally anti-English, and his absurd, over-the-top rhetoric about this shambolic proposition more than proves it.
"Soon you will have in England no English presidents," raved Platini.
"You already have no English players and maybe now you will have no clubs playing in England.
It's a joke." This goes far beyond condemnation of a crackpot idea and reveals a deeplyprejudiced mindset against everything Anglo-Saxon. It's hardly our fault that the French league is so poorly attended and uncompetitive, that in order to make a proper career for themselves, almost all of France's leading footballers feel compelled to play abroad, mainly in England.
Perhaps Platini should do something about that. But since he, too, abandoned France at an early stage in his career, he is hardly likely to do so.
And, secondly, it has shown once again how useless the Football Association are. This was a moment for firm leadership but the FA's response has been totally anodyne. Even Pontius Pilate would have handled it better.
