How are you lads? Proper football is soon back and before I get to Aston Villa, there is something rotten in the game and I need to write about it. And it's the England team.
And I don't mean all of them, but the culture of the team. It stems from the manager and the people above him but it's now found it's way into the players and things like this tend to spread.
Jordan Henderson, playing in front of crowds of less than 1,000, gets picked for I don't know why and he gets booed. He's not getting booed for his performances, he's getting booed for selling out. Not just for money, mostly for saying what people wanted to hear one day and then back tracking the day after as soon as a bag of money was offered.
I don't care that he does that. Offer me a small percentage of the money he's on and I'd do the same. And he shouldn't be blamed for getting picked either because that's the result of the manager picking him and why the culture is bad. But Harry Maquire coming out saying England fans that boo him are not proper football fans is a step too far.
Maguire, average at best and getting picked for England simply because he plays for Manchester United has lost the plot and he's lucky he's not getting booed.
I'm not going to talk about his performances, mistakes and blunders, but he turned down West Ham in the summer because he would be earning less and Manchester United wouldn't pay up his contract and they were the ones wanting him gone.
I don't blame them for wanting him gone, he's not a top flight defender. But he's just like Henderson and they're sticking together and like rotten apples in a barrel, the rot is spreading.
And you know what, this post might not age well, because we will be one of the favourites to win the Euros next year and with the players we have, we probably should, but we should have won it last time and we should have done much better in the last World Cup too.
If you take a stick and you beat a dog, you'll kill it. If you bang your head against a brick wall enough times, you'll break through. I think the FA think if they give Gareth Southgate enough years he'll win something. I hope they're right and there is talk he's going to go after this tournament, but he should have gone years ago.
I'll get into trouble for this.
And when I listen to Harry Maguire, it really does wind me up. It's like he's just had a media training session and he's regurgitating content. When I look at him, it's like I'm looking at a man that when the cameras turn off, he turns around and gives two thumbs up. He heard stuff in a few different conversations and he tries to put them into one. I think he stumbles through and he's just happy he found a word that worked.
Again, sorry about this rant. But this is ultimately why I don't watch England and don't really care about the results. There are too many international games and too much money given to people that struggle to string a sentence together. It's not their fault, it's ours. It's the media. And it's because the game is broken.
Football fans can boo. England fans can boo whoever they want. Just like I can write that Harry Maguire and Jordan Henderson are expensive whores and Gareth Southgate is their pimp and the FA are the establishment turning a blind eye because ultimately they're getting a share and they're happy with that and think that everyone else, that's us, are plebs.
And before I forget and because this is in fact an Aston Villa blog, it's West Ham on Sunday. More on that soon. Sorry.