Are you offended by this?

[Lighthouse]

Life is too short to get even remotely upset by this sort of thing.

In the good old days it was regarded as a bit of harmless fun.

Sadly now we are not allowed to make jokes about The Irish or The Welsh Or people who limp or...wait a minute we can laugh at Fat, White English people. No wonder I feel picked on. It used to be harmless fun. Now the Thought Police have made everything dirty.

[finnster01]

One vacation many years ago I was in Monastir, Tunisia and stayed at this huge hotel with 1000+ rooms spread over three very large buildings. The locals called it "The Factory".

Some genius manager at the hotel came up with the fantastic idea to host a hotel "olympics" to keep people busy and have some fun...There were teams from Great Britain, Germany, France and Rest of The World and anyone could sign up for various events respectively. I forget what all the events were, but I signed up for the footie. Eventually we played the German's in the final, and two broken legs and several uncontrollable and embarrassing fist fights in front of women and small children later, we won the "gold". Not sure the ones that paid their savings to go on vacation only to have their legs broken felt that great about it though. Rule Britannia.

[Logicalman]

..........

World cup and MONEY. It is all about the money. The powers that be almost give a free pass to England, France, Italy, germany etc by the seeding. They need them for the MONEY (tv etc). therefore England have not actually played anybody decent for the last 2 years. When they get to the 1/4 final they will probably get found out again.

.......

Whereby I cannot disagree with all you say, I would take umbrage at the false claim that FIFA give a 'free pass' to teams like England, germany, etc, due to the seeding.
Seeding is based on position in the current form table. That being the fairest way in which to do it, imho. How would YOU seed the tournament? Or would you not, and hope that the top 8 teams all fit into one group together and the rest make up the other 6? That might seem fair, but the idea behind the seeding is to ensure there is more of a level playing field out there and the best, or at least one of the best will actually be champions.

When you mentioned about giving free passes, perhaps looking at the form table (world rankings) would have changed your mind ... as of the top 32 ranked countries as of Jan 2009, 4 EUFA groups had just 1 ranked team, the other four had 2 ranked teams, and England was in the latter of those. So as for a easy passage, I think not, compared to at least 4 others.

[FatFreddysCat]

...I have to say that unless England has a Fulham player in it, and because they usually have half the dark side team wearing the three lions (or should that be loins) I don't give a toss.

I will support all the teams that have Fulham players in them...

Same as, but it would be nice to actually feel like supporting England.

i thought you were a jock?

Very confused Donny, but it turns out my Grandad was a Paddy brought up in sweaty land. Either way way i'm a tight thick bastard :(.  Was 100% England, but too many Darkside and manure for my liking, added to the way i think England has gone down the sh1tter and i'm no longer an England fan. BZ if added to the squad will bizarrely make me EngERland again.