Winter break would come at a cost

Dec 23 2007 by Neil Farrington, Sunday Sun

IT’S as inevitable as Steve McQueen racing across your TV screens on a Triumph this Christmas, but as overdone as my Mum’s sprouts.

And, as festive messages go, it’s way more out of touch with its audience than the Queen’s speech.

Yep, compared with Premier League managers’ annual whinge about a mid-winter break, Her Majesty’s message is down with the kids.

Yet still our top-flight bosses blather on about the benefits of shutting down for a fortnight just as our appetite for the game is at its height.

Too many matches in too little time, blah. Pitches in poor nick, blah. Players over-tired, blah. Tired players get injured, blah.

But the customer wants his Chrimbo football. Wants out of a house that stinks of sherry, soap on a rope and turkey sarnies. Wants a break from Pictionary, Cranium and Trivial bleedin’ Pursuit.

And isn’t the customer always right?

As I was reminded the other day by the bloke ahead of me in the queue at “Everything’s A Pound”, who argued his Christmas wrapping paper should cost 89p, no he isn’t.

No, when it comes to our festive fixture programme, the salient point is surely that Sky are always right.

For Murdoch’s men enjoy very merry viewing figures for live games in December and January.

And doesn’t he who pay the piper call the tune?

For once, if the word inside football is to believed, it would seem not.

Years of brow-beating from the likes of Big Sam and Sir Alex, and semi-comprehensible complaints from il signor Benitez and his ilk, long since wore down our friends at the FA.

And despite the game’s true powerbrokers – the Premier League clubs themselves – being against the idea, the smart money (how come I never see any of that?) is on a break being introduced within two or three years.

Granted, I have been assured that the FA is loath to cancel Christmas, and will suspend all football for a fortnight in January instead.

But that would not address the true crux of this argument, which is: what good will a break do at all?

From where I’m standing, it looks like simply giving players two weeks off in the New Year would be a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

We hear all the time about how the English season is too long; about how it stretches too far into summer these days.

Yet unless we stretch it a fortnight even further, our players will pay for their time off in January with the mother of all fixture pile-ups come April and early May.

And I fear that spells trouble for the League Cup.

That few such competitions exist on the Continent makes it easier for foreign leagues to shut up shop in mid-season.

Bring in a mid-winter break here, and the easiest way to tackle the backlog of games either side of it would be to cull the Carling Cup.

Easiest, because it would spare the FA from going after a far worthier, but better-protected, target like the group stage of the UEFA Cup.

Why do I not hear managers moan about that shamelessly bloated money-making machine?

Do they not see that their players would be a darn sight fresher but for having to take on FC Breadqueue of Belarus, among other non-entities, home and away?

Indeed, if managers are really serious about protecting their players, they should campaign against the group stages of the Champions League.

But doing that might mean only a couple of English clubs getting to sit at Europe’s top table.

And that would never do.

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Centre going up in smoke?

HAVING given up trying to rid my shoes of the stench of whatever I stepped in down there last week, I can testify that London’s streets are not paved with gold.

But I can imagine they still smell sweet enough to a tractor boy like David Sheepshanks.

Perhaps memories of his schooldays at manure-free Eton also endear the “Smoke” to this Ipswich Town chairman and Suffolk farmer’s son.

Either way, I reckon Sheepshanks – who also happens to be a member of the Football
Association board – lacks
perspective in his appraisal of London.

Why else would he lead a campaign to switch the National Football Centre from Burton to nearer the capital on a false premise?

“I think it has to be nearer to Wembley, and I think it has to be nearer to London . . . it has to be user-friendly for the England team,” Sheepshanks said of the long-delayed project.

But of the 23 players who appeared in England’s last three games, guess how many were based in London or the South East?

The answer is eight. Or barely one in three. User-friendly? Hmm . . .

Sheepshanks also suggested that the “economics” of building the NFC at Burton “don’t stack up”.

But they surely cannot stack up any worse than the last FA-sanctioned building project in London