The podders assess England’s win over Malta and the rest of the international action: is this the beginning of the end for Wayne Rooney? Plus, Steve Bruce looks set for Aston Villa – but is the Championship’s gain literature’s loss?Subscribe and review: iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, AcastOn today’s Football Weekly, AC Jimbo is joined by Rafa Honigstein, Iain Macintosh and Jacob Steinberg to whiffle on about the World Cup qualifiers. Is this finally the end of the road for Wayne Rooney? Does Gordon Strachan have a clue? Why can’t Wales win any more? Continue reading...
The caretaker manager did what he needed to do with Roberto Mancini in the crowd at what is surely the world’s least intimidating 90,000 national stadiumEnter, the temp-to-perm caretaker. On a subdued afternoon at Wembley, England kicked off their latest not‑quite dawn with a colourless 2-0 defeat of Malta that saw Gareth Southgate stand and fret and look convincing enough on the touchline in his first game as not-quite England manager.Southgate will be condemned by some for the general beigeness of the occasion. He is after all an England manager. This is what we do. But given the poverty of the opposition and the neck-cricking, one-sided nature of the match the idea that this was some kind of audition to...
Wayne Rooney is a reassuring presence but is it time to consider a future without him and Jesse Lingard makes an eye-catching debut in front of Roberto ManciniGareth Southgate had instructed his first lineup as senior manager to be brave and play with style, with neither aspiration particularly easy to achieve against massed ranks of Maltese defence. The way the game drifted tediously through the opening period was, for a while, troubling, yet the interim manager had also stressed the need for patience. “Eventually you wear teams down,” he had said. “They can’t chase you forever.” Related: England make hard work of seeing off Malta in Gareth Southgate’s first game Related: England’s not-quite manager Gareth Southgate survives bland audition |...
The most remarkable thing about the England captain beyond his goalscoring records is that no English footballer has ever been so widely discussedDon’t kill Wayne Rooney. You need Wayne Rooney. These were the last and also the most interesting words spoken by Sven-Goran Eriksson during his time as England manager, a period of almost-success that came flooding back this week with the news the Fake Sheikh Mazher Mahmood has been convicted of perverting the course of justice.Mahmood was the sting artist who plied Sven with £900 champagne on a hired yacht in 2006 to get him to say he wouldn’t mind managing Aston Villa and maybe David Beckham could be persuaded to come too. Yeah. I could do that. Beckham....
England will have a third manager in three games at Wembley on Saturday – at least the latest man in the job can hardly fare worse than his immediate predecessor Sam Allardyce“Bring it on, lads,” Sam Allardyce exclaimed at a press conference three days after accepting the job of managing England. So they did. And 64 days later he was gone.The “lads” had wiped him out, turning him into a candidate for a spectacular entry in the Guinness World Records. Allardyce became the recipient of the largest amount of money ever paid to a man for supervising a single game of football: about £550,000 in salary over the two months, plus a reported £1m in “compensation” for £6m he had...