by Smart
It's Wednesday night and Boro have just been thumped 4-0 by Sevilla in the Wafer Cup Final. Another poor performance by the club team managed by the next England national coach, McLaren. I sit here, dreading the future of English football.
For starters, Sven has lost the plot. Picking 12 year old Theo Walnut whom he admits to never seeing play says it all. And then we have McLaren to 'look forward to'. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think he has managed anything decent since the Sex Pistols.
In an attempt to get my World Cup enthusiasm back, I wonder which of the minnows are worth supporting. Scotland aren't there, so they're a non-starter. Usually for me its Cameroon. For some reason I've always been a fan of Cameroon. Perhaps its because I was stationed there during the war...? I even invested in a Cameroon national top many a moon ago. It was a daring, off the shoulder number in the colours of the national flag (green, red and yellow) with a large yellow star in the middle. Similar in some ways to a McDonalds uniform. But alas, they took a leaf out of Scotland’s book this year.
So just who is there?
I log on to the FIFA website, and the qualifiers are listed in alphabetical order:
- Angola
- Argent... ANGOLA! Why the hell not?
Well, I know nothing about them for a start, that’s why not. But you've gotta start somewhere, right? That’s how my love for Cameroon started. How about Senegal in the 2002 World Cup Finals - need I say more? Nope, Angola it is for me!
So what can I tell you about Angola? Well cast your eyes over these tasty morsels of trivia...
- Players to watch: Fabrice Akwa and Pedro Mantorras
- World ranking : 58
- Odds : 400/1
- The Angolan official language is Portuguese
- The country is one mistyped letter away from being classed as a rabbit, goat or knitting yarn.
Not a lot to go on really is it? Well I'm sure their opponents will be given exactly the same details as I've just highlighted above. It's for them to exploit the opponents weaknesses from such a wealth of information.
Me, I'll just sit in my chair nursing an ice-cold beer, voicing the "GO ANGOLA!" chant that I'll be working on in the forthcoming weeks.
2 comments:
"It's Wednesday night and Boro have just been thumped 4-0 by Sevilla in the Wafer Cup Final. Another poor performance by the club team managed by the next England national coach, McLaren. I sit here, dreading the future of English football.
For starters, Sven has lost the plot. Picking 12 year old Theo Walnut whom he admits to never seeing play says it all. And then we have McLaren to 'look forward to'. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think he has managed anything decent since the Sex Pistols."
Are you a patriot or a papperazi reporter? Knocking the England manager before he even starts the job! Shame on you.
you can't judge him by the way 'boro played the other night, after all he can only work with the players that are available to him......
Damn! you're right! We have no future to look forward to.
Well I see from my Bumper Boys Book of African Football that Angola draw heavily on foreign-based players with Angolan parentage to give their squad some form of resilience. Thanks to the recent civil war in the country, any opportunity to develop home-grown talent has long since gone out of the window.
Despite preventing Nigeria from qualifying, Angola may not be the 21st century's answer to Cameroon that many people may be hoping for. Their best players have been poor during many of their warm-up matches while others have had personal issues to contend with. Goalkeeper Joao Ricardo wasn't signed to a club last season and Mantorras had a big bust up with the national coach after being relegated to the bench on more than the odd occasion.
If it's innocent naivety you want, feel free to follow Angola during the 2006 World Cup, but don't expect much more than that - that's all I can advise!