This is not a piece about whether Spain are boring. There’s plenty of those around, all attempting to answer an unanswerable and largely incoherent question that’s more about personal taste and emotional reaction than it is about any fundamental truth. If you think Spain are boring, then they are; if you don’t, they’re not. And if somebody thinks they are, then saying “but they’re really good and they win loads and you’re a moron with no understanding of football and you suffer from a deluded sense of entitlement” isn’t suddenly going to make them interesting. Nor is it going to make you any friends.

But the fact that the argument was happening — and for all I know continues to do so; following medical advice, I’m not allowed to participate any more — is interesting. (I think so, anyway.) The fact that so many people on either side of the debate got themselves so wound-up about the whole thing is evidence, I think, that when it comes to this Spain there isn’t much else to say. The more important question — whether they’re actually any good — has been so comprehensively dealt with that, unless we’re all willing to break the habit of a lifetime and watch football in silence, there’s nothing else to talk about.

Are they any good? Yes. Are they the best team in Europe? Yes. Are they the best team in the world? Yes. The only places for the conversation to go are whether they’re the greatest of all time – which brings its own special kind of thundering futility — and whether we enjoy watching them play. We have to bicker about the subjective experience of watching them, because the answers to the objective questions of their quality are so obvious, and therefore mundane, that it’s hard to sustain any kind of dialogue.

“Spain are amazing!”

“That’s right!”

“Good!”

“Yes!”

“Right then!”

Plenty of people tipped teams that weren’t Spain for Euro 2012. All of them — and I was one; damn you, France – did so as much in hope than expectation. It takes a conscious act of will to look beyond a team whose weakest link is Real Madrid’s right-back; who have won the last two major tournaments they played in; who haven’t conceded a knock-out goal since the late Cretaceous. As Rob Smyth puts it in the Guardian:

Spain’s miracle has been drastically to minimise the variables of knockout football and make themselves near to unbeatable

and we all knew that. Yet we still have to talk about something.

Football is often described as a game of opinions, which it isn’t. It’s a game of events. But the space between those events — everything that is football but isn’t the game itself, if you like — is filled with opinion, along with nostalgia, hope, despair, and all the other flavours of wittering that we poor desperate lonely folk use to stave off the ever-growing void in our souls. Spain, though, are so predictable, both in their excellence and in the method of that excellence, that their fixtures have become increasingly a given. We know it, they know it, and opponents, quivering behind their double-banked defences, know it too.

And that, perhaps, is what lies behind the “boring” criticism (which is, as Smyth notes, more fairly a question of whether their games are boring, rather than they themselves). It’s not just that their style is anaesthetising (though it can be), or that they prioritise control over chaos (though they do). It’s that their brilliance, however entrancing, intricate, and admirable the mechanisms, runs counter to the one great advantage of sport-as-entertainment: the uncertainty. We know the plot, and we know the ending. This isn’t a criticism of Spain, for they are virtually beyond criticism now. That is both the highest compliment possible, and maybe — for those who find them curiously lacking in visceral enchantment — the problem.

As England tournament exits go, this must be among the calmest in recent memory. The 2010 World Cup was a bitter departure, footballing humiliation laced with snipe, recrimination, and mutterings about goalline technology. 2006 was perhaps less embarrassing on the pitch, but Wayne Rooney’s decision to indulge in a moment of incautious studbanter inRicardo Carvalho’s personal space, andCristiano Ronaldo’s subsequent, heinous wink, ensured that a suitably hysterical tone accompanied England on their way. Even Euro 2004, which was at least a hopeful exit after Rooney’s terrifying emergence onto the national stage, had its own serving of ensuing nuttiness, as the British tabloids decided that the best way of dealing with Sol Campbell’s disallowed winner was to publish the personal details of referee Urs Meier. Death threats and police protection duly followed.

This time, nothing of the sort. No root vegetables, no donkeys, no scapegoats. A curious calm lies across the nation, a calm born of the dominant (though not unanimous, as we’ll get to later) sense that this time England, though ultimately well-beaten, have “exceeded expectations”.

Before the tournament started, Alan Shearer took some stick for suggesting that low expectations might help England. What he meant was that it might directly assist the players in playing better, which isn’t completely ludicrous — it’s not as though pressure isn’t a thing, after all — but probably isn’t going to make up for everything else. However, like a short-sighted man chatting up a postbox, he may have accidentally hit on something. A nation that doesn’t expect can never be disappointed. If it didn’t make England any better, at least it made their not being particularly good more palatable.

Expectations colour reality. The mundane march of events, of things happening — one after another after another, on and on without end — is contextualised and characterised in part by what was anticipated. A quarter-final spot for a team with no expectation of getting out of the group is a fantastic achievement; for the same team, with different expectations, the semi-final might constitute a failure. Just ask Ally MacLeod. And there are other expectations of football teams that go beyond the simple measures of progress and results: style, perhaps, or good conduct, or that vague yet palpable sense that a flying one has been given.

The immediate reasons for the low expectations of England are well-trodden, but to quickly recap: the sudden resignation of Fabio Capello and the timescale for locating his replacement; the reported fissures in the squad stemming from the pending court case against John Terry; the litany of injuries that denied Hodgson the services of, among others, Jack Wilshere, Gareth Barry, Kyle Walker, Frank Lampard, and Gary Cahill; the climate created by the cries of knicker-twisted horror that arose from various of the commentariat at the appointment of Not Harry Redknapp; and Wayne Rooney’s two-game suspension. To this can perhaps be added a vague national weariness with certain of the now-waning personalities of the pyrite generation, and of course the naturally cautious, careful nature of Hodgson himself, a man who, if passed a tub and asked to give it a thump, would carefully examine it from all angles, smile wistfully, then pop it in his bag to hold tomorrow’s sandwiches.

Such an approach is one of the concerns that exercise many of the Hodge-sceptics — hello, Anfield! SB Nation calling — who not only see him as being roughly to football what a wet tea-towel is to a chip pan, but discern a cynicism in that dampening tendency. The suggestion is that by seeking to lower the expectations of England, Hodgson is also lowering the expectations of himself. That if the nation is depressed enough, then the ‘achievement’ of mediocrity becomes acceptable, even laudable. That aiming low is the refuge of a coward with no idea how to aim high.

That last point is at heart a question of taste, and even if accepted, doesn’t negate the less than favourable circumstances. It does, though, affect how the football that England played — largely defensive and reactive, at times anodyne and stultifying — should be assessed: was this a man making the best of a bad hand, or was this a statement of the opposite of intent? Was this Hodgson making do, or was this all he can do?

(As an irrelevant aside, it’s sort-of possible to discern, in the three group games, the traces of each of Hodgson’s last three club jobs. Against France, we saw two disciplined, tight, well-drilled banks of four squeeze the life out of the game, pinching a goal from a set piece while restricting technically superior opponents to shots from distance. One of them went in, yes, but that’s the risk you take. That’s the Hodgson we all expected, and that’s the West Bromwich Albion manager that the FA appointed. Then, against Sweden, switching leads and surprisingly pell-mell entertainment brought to mind Fulham’s bonkers run to the UEFA Cup final, before finally, in the first half against the Ukraine, a lifeless, lightless slog straight out of that long strange Anfield autumn.)

It’s far too early to tell, of course, and the most important thing that Hodgson has had very little of is time. International seasons are two years and thirty-odd games long; Hodgson has had two months and six. Whether he has it about him to make the changes that England require — the stylistic and selectorial ones are within his ambit; the institutional and cultural ones, not so much — is a mystery, and will remain so for a good while yet. Perhaps the reason England exceeded expectations in the eyes of so many is not that those expectations were traditionally low – ‘we are rubbish and will lose’ — but more that nobody really had any coherent footballing expectations at all.

Anything could have happened, for nobody really knew what Anglohodgeball was. (We still don’t, though doubtless we all have our suspicions.) In such circumstances, expectations are naturally either tangential — ‘don’t humiliate yourselves’, perhaps, or ‘try not to inspire any effigies’ — or hopelessly vague. So getting just about far enough, though not in any great style, along with seeming to care, with a few of the kids looking like they’ve got something about them, and with nobody getting sent off for stamping on anybody’s testicles looks, if not like much of a success, then not much like a failure either. At heart, and in a funny sort of way, England’s Euro 2012 barely existed at all.

Still, expectations are tricksy, blowsy things. They pitch and yaw at the mercy of hype-swells, mood-currents, and the crashing breakers of circumstance. One moment they’re becalmed in a flat and dispiriting stillness, the next soaring ahead of a hot, strong wind; if they’re grievously holed beneath the waterline today, by tomorrow they might have gone completely overboard. And when you start with expectations as low as this, the very fact of exceeding them means that they will already be growing. Optimism, by its very nature, doesn’t remain cautious for long.

Poor boys in green. Watching Ireland quail and crumple at the sight of Spain’s delicate and smothering carousel was the one genuinely depressing moment of football that Euro 2012 has so far served up. According to a stereotype-happy El Mundo ”the Irish potatoes rushed into the bag laid out by the Spanish team.”; according to every single wit on Twitter, it was “Murder on Gdansk floor”; according to Shay Given, who had as good a view as anybody, Ireland were “ripped apart”.

But as well as being far too one-sided a skelping to constitute a decent football match, this was also a harbinger of things to come. The future is mis-matched by design. This is the last time that the European Championships will be made up of 16 teams; the last tournament before it succumbs to the all-swallowing, all-ruining bloat that is busy sucking the significance out of football. Following a unanimous decision of UEFA’s Executive committee, France 2016 will be contested by 24 teams.

To give some idea of how a 24-team tournament might look, let’s get all hypothetical, and expand this tournament. We’ll take the 16 that are already qualified, add the four sides defeated in the play-offs (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, Montenegro and Estonia), and then the four best third-placed teams from qualifying (Norway, Hungary, Armenia and Switzerland, once you adjust the groups for size). Shuffle them into pots according to seedings and hosting rights, and you get the following:

1: Poland, Ukraine, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, Italy

2: England, Russia, Croatia, Greece, Portugal, Sweden

3: Denmark, France, Czech Republic, Republic of Ireland, Switzerland, Turkey

4: Bosnia & Herzegovina, Norway, Hungary, Montenegro, Estonia, Armenia

In the interests of complete authenticity, I employed a glamorous assistant to, er, assist with the actual draw, and shaved my head to get the full Gianni Infantino effect. And Euro 2012+ ended up with the following groups:

A: Poland, Greece, France, Estonia

B: Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Armenia

C: Italy, England, Republic of Ireland, Norway

D: Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Bosnia & Herzegovina

E: Germany, Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary

F: Ukraine, Croatia, Turkey, Montenegro

Which by my count amounts to one Group of Serious Maiming (D), a couple of Groups of Hacking Cough (A, F), and three Groups of Meh. Portugal and Denmark will be nervous, and the two host nations have got tricky company. The rest of the group stage looks processional at best. (And yes, there’ll probably be one or two shocks, but that’s not the same as the current system, which more-or-less guarantees major bloodshed from the outset.)

It’s worth dwelling on the format for a bit as well. The most likely arrangement — as used in the 24-team World Cups of 1986, 1990, and 1994 — sees the introduction of a round-of-16 knockout-stage. So after 36 group games, 8 teams are eliminated, and the top two from each group plus the four best third-placed teams proceed. Those commentators that insist on reaching for an abacus — an abacus, chaps? Really? — when working out the permutations for the groups as they are now may well find their brains leaking out of their ears. And unless all the groups play their last games at the same time — and there’s no way television would settle for that — then the teams in each successive group have an increasing advantage, as it becomes clearer what will be required to finish third and go through. What was simple, elegant and fair, becomes contrived, clumsy and skewed.

There’s another problem when it comes to working who plays who in the second round. With 16 teams, every team that tops a group plays one that finished second, which is straightforward and has an intuitive fairness. But six groups winners, six runners-up, and four third-placed teams don’t slot easily into the eight knock-out ties. As an example, the 1990 World Cup saw the six group winners playing the four third-placed teams and two of the runners-up, while the other four runners-up played each other. Again, the simple and logical is jettisoned in favour of the clunky and ill-balanced.

Finally, to return to my original point, changing to 24 teams means more games like yesterday’s: a weak team being bent over the knee of a strong one, and soundly thrashed. Or “a qualifying match”, as they’re known for the rest of the year. The only people that really enjoyed yesterday are those weird perverts who like counting passes, and Fernando Torres’s mother. It’ll be nice for the fans of those teams that wouldn’t normally qualify to get the opportunity to go to a tournament, yet not only will the achievement of having got there be diminished, but also, as Roy Keane smouldered after Ireland were beaten, what’s the point if you’re just going for a sing-song?

I’m not arguing that theoretically lesser teams should be excluded from the Euros. Well, okay, I am. But I’m doing so on the basis that such exclusion makes the Euros a better tournament. That’s the entire point of having such a thing as a “finals”; involve nearly half the continent, and it doesn’t really have the same air of elite footballing achievement. At least you can argue that the World Cup, which has an entire planet to service, needs to be a bit bloated. The current European Championship system — two years of qualifying where all teams intermingle and the best ones progress, followed by four weeks of as-close-to-perfect-dammit-as-we’re-likely-to-get tournament football — works; think about how good Euro 2000 was, or how much you’re enjoying this one. The tournament is sleek and the concept is simple, the teams are (mostly) competitive and the wallchart is straightforward.

What’s that, Mr Platini? You think there’s more money in having 24 teams? Well, why didn’t you sayso? Strike the above, all; sorry to have wasted your time. God knows what I was thinking. 20 more games in the tournament? Adidas will be pleased. In the words of General Secretary David Taylor, “National-team football is unbeatable in terms of TV rankings and the interest that it generates — why not increase the number of teams?”

Why not indeed? Because I’ll watch it, and so will you. What else are we going to do? Watching football defines who we are: we watched the extra group stage of the Champions League, we’d have watched Game 39, and we’ll all watch the European Super League whenever the clubs get tired of pretending to care about Financial Fair Play. Kick a ball, and we’ll salivate. Such loyalty — such sweet, hopeless trust — deserves protection from those that might consider themselves stewards of the game, but it rarely gets it, and never when there’s advertisers clamouring for more.

It wasn’t meant to be like this.

Had everything gone to plan, Harry Redknapp would currently be relaxing at the end of another day’s training with the England squad, full of good spirit and looking forward to Friday’s game against Sweden. Instead, he’s clearing his desk, saying his goodbyes, and pulling out of his White Hart Lane parking space for the last time. Perhaps we’ll be given one last interview out of the car window, for old times’ sake, before he’s off to spend more time with Jamie and the Wii. It has been, even by the vertiginous standards of modern football, one hell of a fall. 

Of course, it’s all Bacary Sagna’s fault. Since the Frenchman’s comically unlikely header sparked a 5-2 rout at the Emirates back in late February, virtually nothing has gone Redknapp’s way. Six points came from nine games. The gap between third and fourth shrank, then vanished. St. Totteringham’s Day suddenly popped back into the calendar. And then finally Roberto di Matteo’s Chelsea did what they weren’t supposed to do in the Champions League — three times — and by virtue of the Blues’ heroic CL victory in Munich, Spurs were left with a fourth place finish that felt a lot like fifth.

No, wait, let’s blame Fabio Capello. Redknapp’s slump, after all, coincided neatly with the Italian’s resignation from the England job, leaving a vacuum that was quickly filled with a deafening clamor from the English commentariat, who fell over one another to hail Redknapp as the new Sir Bobby Ramsey in ever more breathless and hilarious terms. (One even used the word “cuddly.” Cuddly!) Football teams that know their manager is leaving can be curious, drifting things — see Manchester United, 2001/02 — and the sense that a certain focus had gone was palpable as Tottenham labored.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s Redknapp’s own fault. On Tuesday the Guardian (among others) reported that Redknapp’s negotiations over a new contract were floundering — over both his demands for a long-term deal and his public statements that any delay or uncertainty would affect the players. It’s unlikely that Tottenham’s chairman Daniel Levy failed to notice that this last comment directly contradicts Redknapp’s earlier position – “They don’t care whether I’m the manager next year, they wouldn’t lose any sleep over that or whoever comes.” — when more welcome speculation linked him to the national job.

Ultimately, if you double down on your own reputation, you’d better make damn sure your chairman thinks you’re worth as much as you do.

In the final analysis, Redknapp’s Tottenham tenure is a curious and ambiguous one. While he didn’t get his hands on a big shiny silver pot — losing the 2009 League Cup final on penalties to Manchester United was as close as he came — he did oversee decent league finishes of fourth, fifth and fourth again, mastermind the scalpings of both clubs in Milan, play some genuinely thrilling football and introduced us all to the exercise in sexy, saucer-eyed wonderment that is a galloping Gareth Bale.

Yet so much of that comes tinged with what-ifs and but-fors: fourth place good, losing third place bad; FA Cup semifinal good, 5-1 humiliation by Chelsea bad; Bale good, Bale charging impotently through the middle bad. The positives probably outweigh the negatives, but not to such a startling degree as to make him irreplaceable. And that, perhaps, is the key.

Redknapp’s record is arguably lacking the kind of spectacular achievement that would make his position bulletproof and the months of waiting for him to be offered the England job — in the certain knowledge that he would accept — rather made the idea of Tottenham without him a little too real.

Daniel Levy is not a fool. He will not have spent that time with his fingers crossed, begging the powers that be to intervene and save his manager. He will have been thinking. Planning. Preparing for a life without Redknapp, mulling over the relative merits of David Moyes, Andre Villas-Boas, and doubtless one or two others. For Tottenham, have an outstanding first eleven and a decent squad, and while Redknapp’s a good manager with an intuitive appreciation of how to put footballers together — and, more importantly, keep them happy — he’s no alchemist. This side isn’t about to revert to base metal.

It is perhaps a little unfair to compare Redknapp to the dog in the fable that sees what looks like a juicier cut of meat reflected in the water, opens his mouth to seize it and ends up with nothing. After all, it’s not his fault that everybody bar the FA decided he was getting the job. Yet there is something strangely hubristic about the whole episode: a managerial record less substantial than it appears, a new job offer that failed to materialize and a solid negotiating position that turned out to built on sand.

Ultimately, Redknapp’s fall is not down to any one failing in his performance or in his conduct; there’s no ‘two points from eight games’ smoking gun. But in asking for a three-to-four-year contract at the age of 65, Redknapp was testing Levy’s belief in his ability and his commitment, in the wake of a season that called them both firmly into question. As Charles de Gaulle would have said if he hadn’t been distracted at a young age by politics, the punditry couches are full of indispensible men.

Euro 2012 is coming, and along with it looms another England failure. Optimism is at an all-time low, and the usual hype-fuelling simpletons have had to resort to suggesting, a touch desperately, that lowered expectations might – just might! – catapult England further than anybody dare hope. While this isn’t totally illogical — if we accept that over-burdening a team with expectation can depress their chances, then not doing so should avoid the same — no amount of modesty is going to make England’s squad anything other than what it is: thin, and liberally garnished with mediocrity. But, while the specifics of this inevitable failure are for the future to reveal, one thing is certain. John Terry will be getting a fair chunk of the blame.

Though fair might not be the word. After all, it’s not Terry’s fault that Jack Wilshere is injured, or that English football concedes a significant technical advantage to its continental foes, or thatWayne Rooney is missing the first two games, or that Stewart Downing. But the consequences of his forthcoming trial, and more specifically its postponement until after the Euros, have been calamitous in the extreme: first the FA felt they had to strip him of the captaincy; then Fabio Capello felt he had to resign; then Capello’s replacement, Roy Hodgson, felt he couldn’t include both Terry and his alleged victim’s Anton Ferdinand’s brother, Rio, in the same squad. Hodgson’s hamfisted diplomatic solution — “footballing reasons” — looked anaemic even before the injuries that have scythed through England’s squad; now, as Liverpool’s intermittently promising but profoundly inexperienced Martin Kelly joins the squad, it looks beyond resuscitation.

Of course, Terry’s not responsible for the decisions of the FA, or the actions of his managers past and present. But then Terry inspires a quite remarkable and near-universal loathing throughout English football that doesn’t always bother with precise details. He is a broad strokes hate figure, and there’s something for everybody. Moralists tut over the insensitive drunken binge in the wake of September 11 and the allegations of infidelity with a teammate’s ex-partner, while aesthetes sneer at his Cro-Magnon defending and sigh as he flings his body into tackle after block after crunch after smash after hit. Nationally, England fans that have abandoned the golden generation as being naught but gilt point to his crucial role in derailing at least one major tournament and the resignation of England’s best recent manager, while those that still entertain the faint and flickering hope that the pyrite frauds might genuinely glister, just the once, despair of his turbulent, toxic presence in the squad. Those that look to the soul of a man grind their teeth at his self-aggrandisement, kvetch at his badge-thumping, and blink in disbelief as words like “[Guus Hiddink's] obviously a very good guy … I kept in contact on a personal level, and that speaks volumes for him” fall out of his mouth. Those that mourn the surrender of English football to the petrodollar have had to watch him wave Abramovich’s silverware, and everybody hates Chelsea at the best of times.

A moment’s online canvassing adds to the above his habit of wearing The Armband after removing his shirt, his tendency to make himself the centre of any stage he happens to find himself on, his lack of a compass, positional or moral, his smugness, his face, his eyes, his expression, his misadventures with a nightclub floor and a disabled parking space, a litany of further allegations that can’t be repeated here for legal reasons, and a cavalcade of short, plosive words that can’t be repeated here just in case there are children reading.

It’s a formidable list. Nevertheless, it is odd just how cartoonish the hatred of Terry has become. We have reached a stage where he is loathed not for the things he does but for the simple fact that it’s him doing them; witness the total lack of condemnation for any of Chelsea’s other suspended players that took to the pitch in their kit after the Champions League final, apparently following a UEFA edict. Granted, they may not have put their shinpads on, and yes, they hadn’t missed the game because one of the most risible red cards in recent memory, but still. Nobody’s been photoshopping Branislav Ivanovic into the background of the royal wedding.

Similarly, nobody seems to pay too much attention to the fact that it was Chelsea executive Ron Gourlay that requested the trial be delayed, or that the organs responsible for publishing the details of his alleged affair — the Mail on Sunday and the lately-departed-but-little-lamented News of the World, renowned bastions of probity and fearless seekers of truth the pair — eventually, and very quietly, followed their scoop with apologies to Wayne Bridge’s former partner Vanessa Perroncel, acknowledging not only that they had invaded her privacy (well, duh) but also that at least some of the details they had published simply weren’t true. Perroncel, for her part, has always flatly denied it, but nobody seems too bothered about that either. If Terry’s there, or thereabouts, then it must be so, because … well, because it’s John Terry.

For Terry has become a pantomime villain: a dastardly caricature of evil to be booed as he enters, hissed as he exits, and jeered at all points in between. The loathing he inspires — however legitimate its initial, individual motivations — has become a thing in its own right, a living, breathing, swelling cloud of derision that suffuses everything he does, or is alleged to have done with an overweening and revolting musk. Indeed, from some angles, the fundamental Terry-ness of Terry is distracting from the seriousness of his trial, which matters not only because of the nature of the allegations, but also because of the season just gone in England, and the rather depressing suggestion that racism might not have been kicked all as far out as we’d have hoped.

Terry and the wider public are trapped in a feedback loop of contempt, quite out of his and our control, and on reflection he probably has a decent claim to being the most personally loathed footballer of all time. Perhaps it is his misfortune to playing in an age where footballers, gifted money and celebrity, inhabit a weird vortex of perpetual scrutiny and instantaneous judgement; perhaps he really is just that bad an egg. But one thing is certain. No matter the outcome of Euro 2012, or of his trial, the court of public opinion — which has little respect for matters sub judice at the best of times — handed down its verdict long ago. As the chant has it: “John Terry. We know what you are.”

In the interests of full disclosure, let me begin by saying that I have absolutely no personal experience to support the point I’m about to make. I’ve never tried it, never even really thought about trying it, and so could be completely wrong.

But it strikes me that parking a bus might be quite difficult. Buses are big, unwieldy things, and while perhaps gliding one to a stop into an empty car park wouldn’t pose too much of a problem, as soon as any amount of intricate manoeuvring is required – beep, beep, beep – then it appears to be a task well beyond the ken of most drivers.

Not that you’d know it to listen to some of the criticism that followed Chelsea’s Champions League win, which has been airily dismissed as simply an exercise in coach distribution. Defending, particularly on this punchdrunk island, is a tolerated art at best, and any triumphs that follow from its suspicious ways are viewed as being somehow against the spirit of the thing.

Sometimes that’s fair enough. Watching a side play defensively when you know that they’ve got it in themselves to cut loose is deeply frustrating, as anyone that’s watched Manchester United in Europe for the last few years can tell you. More generally, it’s not unreasonable to be personally disappointed that a game hasn’t provided the kind of entertainment that you prefer. There are as many ways of enjoying a football match as there are people will to watch it — I, for one, view any game that doesn’t feature Alvaro Recoba taking a free-kick as more or less a waste of everyone’s time — and if you like attacking football, then you’re bound to be frustrated. It’s also true that attacking football tends to stick in the mind: more attacking means more goals, more goals means more memories, more memories means a bigger myth. ‘Block of the season’ remains a specialist business.

But is there a wider point here? Is it somehow an affront to football itself, to the soul of the game, to defend one’s way to a trophy? Maybe, on some plane of which we know nothing, the delicate nymph Corinthia greeted the final whistle in Munich with paroxysms of tears, while her wicked sister Pragmatia gyrated provocatively around her stricken form. Should we mourn along with her?

I don’t think so. There’s a distinction to be drawn between a team deliberately playing within itself, and what Chelsea were doing, which was making the most of difficult circumstances. The former is deeply frustrating both as a neutral and a fan; there are few things as saddening as an unswashed buckler. The latter, though, is a different percolator of fish: perhaps not as entertaining to the neutral, perhaps not as soothing to the purist, but certainly not something that can be dismissed as anti-football.

After all, Chelsea, who’d spent a fair chunk of the season as a shambles, were missing their best midfielder, their second-best defender, and their legendary, leaderly captain. They had a big shiny pot to win, and whether they set out to defend (as the selection of Ryan Bertrand on the left-wing might suggest) or were forced into it by their opponents is rather beside the point. They did what needed to be done, just about, with helpful dollops of fortune along the way. Criticising them for not reversing the odds with enough style seems more than a little churlish, and I think it’s safe to say that neither Chelsea’s fans nor players give a flying one.

What will stick in the mind about this Chelsea team is that they were a mess on the point of elimination three times — after the first leg in Naples; after the first goal in Barcelona; after the first goal in Munich — and yet they somehow found a way to do enough each time. Triumph in the face of adversity is a different kind of compelling, and all play and no work makes football a very dull boy indeed. Sometimes, you just have to look at a bus, and say “well parked”.

As football fans living in the future, we are assailed on all sides by numbers. Pass completion percentages, successful dribble tottage, chance creation ratios, interceptions per moon phase … if it exists, it can be measured, and compared, and used for all manner of things: to provide illumination to analysis, to pad out an opinion piece, or even to justify a frankly baffling purchase strategy.

There’s no metric for terror, though. Some players are just scary. They pick up the ball, and if they’re playing for you, then your eyes widen and your pulse quickens and your mouth opens and you stand up; if you’re a neutral, then you let the conversation drift and refocus in anticipation; and if they’re playing for them, suddenly all the private circles of your body pucker.

The two most straightforwardly scary players in the world are, obviously, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, both of whom send quivers a-quivering almost every time they touch the ball. However, not only are they two men apart from the rest of the game — one has already glided his way into the pantheon, the other is rudely barging past security — but also, neither is appearing in this Saturday’s Champions League final. So let’s talk about someone else. Apart from Him, and apart from Him as well, the most terrifying player on the planet is Arjen Robben.

The Dutchman is an unusual case. All the normal ingredients apply — he’s technically brilliant, imaginative, almost as quick with the ball as without, and able to kick the thing really hard if the situation demands it — but that doesn’t quite explain his scariness. His Bayern teammate Franck Ribery has all that, and is in most respects the equal of his Dutch cater-cousin, but he doesn’t inspire the same fear when he picks up the ball; in other words, it’s not just the football.

Nor does Robben produce with the relentlessness that might inspire fear. Brittle of both body and spirit, his career has been disrupted by twang upon strain upon niggle, and encouragingly for Chelsea, blighted with a number of significant, high-pressure misses. This season alone he’s scorned both an open goal in the Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid (which ended up not mattering), and a penalty against Borussia Dortmund (which definitely did, as Neven Subotic was quick to point out). More famously, and to Howard Webb’s ongoing relief, he spurned Holland’s best chance to nick the 2010 World Cup final. Some players bring guaranteed punishment; not Arjen.

What makes Robben scary is the way he moves. Not the style — though he does run with a strange, slanted, syncopated whirr, the blessed left foot obsessively tending the ball, the benighted right shambling along behind, unloved and underused, his body tidelocked as the moon — but the lines. He has an instinctive, almost preternatural feeling for the geometry of collapsing defences: if I run here, then here, then here, this whole thing will come crumbling down around me. Like those apocryphal martial artists that just have to tap a rock to create a mound of gravel, Robben is an expert in locating, then punishing, the fissures and weaknesses in even a slightly-disorganised defensive unit. It’s easy to understand why Jose Mourinho, obsessed as he is with the transition of teams from defence into attack, used him to such great effect at Chelsea.

It’s not that he always scores, or that he can trick his way past a defence. It’s that when he picks up the ball in broken play, the safety and security falls out of opponents’ world, and even the tightest defence knows that they might end up spinning and stumbling and splayed on the floor, while Robben skips off into a gap that nobody even knew was there.

After the victory, the carping. If it was inevitable that Manchester City were going to win the title before too long, and it was, then it was equally inevitable that their victory would be followed by a susurrus of voices casting doubt upon the validity of their triumph. Those of you that hoped we’d got all of this out of the way withChelsea, or maybe even with Blackburn before them, are going to have to resign yourselves to another tilt around the carousel of snark and counter-snark:

MUFC fan: “You bought the title.”

MCFC fan: “Yeah, but you did it first.”

MUFC fan: “Yeah, but you had the title bought for you.”

Chelsea fan: *innocent whistle*

Arsenal fan: *sob*

Blackburn fan: “Ah, memories …”

Liverpool fan: “Net spend!”

You can make a very good case that money earned is better than money given, and so assert that “buying the title” through the remorseless hiking of ticket prices and hawking of advertising space is morally superior to simply catching the eye of a very rich man who wants to sit in a comfortable chair while people he owns run around for his amusement. That’s a different question. The provenance of the money is debatable; the necessity of it is not, and is the tragedy. It is now virtually impossible to conceive of an English league champion that hasn’t built their triumph on vast quantities of cold, hard cash. And while it is true that spending money doesn’t guarantee success — hi Leeds! — this slides weakly past the point: not spending money definitely guarantees not-success. The rich can always fail, but the poor can never succeed.

Of course, the connection between money and power is as old as money itself; one pertinent example, as pointed out by Jonathan Wilson on T*****r, is that Manchester United were given £60,000 in 1909 by one of their owners, John Henry Davies. They won their second title shortly afterwards. Liverpool weren’t shy of paying for their talent through the seventies and the eighties, and before them Everton were known as the Mersey Millionaires thanks to the generosity of chairman, Sir John Moores. To carp about bought titles is, it would appear, to carp about the rule rather than the exception.

But to just accept that – plus ca change – is to lose sight of the importance of degree. To put this all another way, the problem is not that success can and has been bought — it can, in anything. O blessed world! — but that the number of people capable of buying success has shrunk and is shrinking further. Should Glazernomics roll out to its logical, post-Ferguson conclusion, then the Premier League might amount, in fairly short order, to a constituency of one.

The difference is in the scale. Following inflation, £60,000 in 1909 is the equivalent of around £5.6m now, which these days wouldn’t even buy you Roger Johnson. Davies, whose money was used to fund the move to Old Trafford, was a wealthy man by local and maybe even national standards, the chairman of various brewing companies and linked via his wife to the Tate sugar fortune. Sheikh Mansour, on the other hand, topped FourFourTwo’s 2011/12 football rich list with an estimated fortune of £20bn. The £930m that City have spent would have been worth around £9.8m in 1909. Maybe the title has always been bought. But rarely have so few been able to afford it.

Let’s think ahead to next season. Either Manchester United will buy some new players and win (possibly), or Manchester City will buy some new players and win (probably), and the year after that the same. Their closest rival, after all, finished nineteen points behind, and are about to lose their best player. UEFA’s FFP may work, or it may not; most likely, it will simply fossilise the pre-existing hierarchies. There will never be a Premier League Montpellier. As things stand, here is a league with precisely one model for success, a model that is now beyond the reach of almost all its participants. The shirt colour may have changed, and the trophy may be on the other side of the city, but the Premier League continues, and becomes ever more itself.

They don’t tell you about the dreams.

Becoming manager of England? It’s a lot to take in. They stick you in front of the press and expect you to answer questions about why you’re not somebody else. They walk you round the vast underground hangar that holds generations of official England kit in every shape and size, including the rejected Euro ’96 goalkeeping kits, and the range of St George’s Cross rain ponchos that Steve McClaren never got the chance to approve. They take you round Wembley: this is — well, was — where Kevin Keegan resigned in tears. It was a toilet then. It’s a slightly newer toilet now. That isn’t a metaphor.

But they don’t tell you about the dreams. And so on that first night, when Roy Hodgson slipped into his freshly-ironed navy blue pyjamas, snuggled up against his World Cup Willie hot-water bottle, and drifted off into Morpheus’ sweet and tender embrace, he was unprepared for the visions that came and assailed his sleeping brain.

Meaty thighs. Flashing elbows. Broad, noble foreheads. Ball after ball flying into the mixer; defender after defender sprawling helpless on the turf. Guttural roars from the stands. Power. Presence. Arcing crosses, dispatched into the corners of the net with brutal and hideous contempt. Searching passes, neatly diverted into the path of diminutive second-ball sniffers. Desperate opponents flailing limply, bruised and beaten and crushed into nothingness.

Hodgson, like his predecessors, sees this panoply of myth and folk memory every time he closes his eyes. And this is why he, like his predecessors, wakes up every morning knowing what the England team needs. It needs a Big Man Who Can Put Himself About A Bit, for They Do Not Like It Up Them. As it was, so shall it ever be.

Quite what It is, and how exactly one puts it Up Them, remains mercifully shrouded in mystery. But the Big Man is crucial to an England squad, and not just because for all that we live in the age oftiki-taka, direct football done well still works. In much the same way that an Argentinean squad needs a short lad laced with gossamer and latent violence, and the Dutch need master technicians salted with mutual loathing, so England needs its hulking totem, otherwise things just don’t feel right. An England squad without a Big Man? When will the EU stop interfering with the nation’s affairs?

Emile Heskey, of course, is the most emblematic of England’s recent Big Men, a curiosity of a footballer whose value as a Big Man seemed to swell in inverse proportion to his usefulness as a goalscorer and footballer, as though the fact that he wasn’t scoring many, or even any, meant that he must be doing something else, even if that something else amounted, ultimately, to simply occupying a considerable-yet-disappointingly static chunk of space. His alternate, Peter Crouch, is a kind of unwilling Big Man, a perfectly reasonable footballer who is doomed, thanks to his incongruous tallness, to be pressed into a role for which he is temperamentally unsuited, like a jazz musician who wrote one Christmas single many years ago, just to pay the rent, and now finds himself unable to escape the long shadow of “(I Can’t Wait To Get My Hands On) Santa’s Big Shiny Baubles”, no matter how far out he sends his skronking clarinet.

And as Euro 2012 approaches, Hodgson — not an implacable opponent of direct football at the best of times — finds himself at something of a Big Man crossroads. Crouch notwithcrouching, the two outstanding candidates for this most culturally weighty of squad spaces are Andy Carroll and Grant Holt: the former the eighth most expensive footballer in history and current custodian of the history-drenched Liverpool #9 shirt; the latter an ex-tyrefitter, whose route to the top has taken him all the way up the pyramid, from non-league Workington to Norwich City.

Of the two, Holt would be both more interesting and more pleasing a selection. Not only has he comfortably outperformed Carroll over the course of the season, but he has done so at a nominally smaller club, in a manner that has brought joy and warmth to every Norwich fan and plenty of neutrals as well. It would be a welcome reminder that there are other paths into the England team; that a player doesn’t have to come through at a large club, and run through the system of underage teams, followed by a flawless graduation to the senior side, as is the tradition. It would reconnect the very top of English football to the levels at the bottom, a fundamentally worthwhile business, if only because it might vaguely annoy Richard Scudamore.

But Carroll is probably the favourite. He is a Big Man not just for now, but for the future, and judging by his recent performances he has rediscovered the unrefined berserker effectiveness of his better games for Newcastle. To watch the Chelsea defence after Carroll’s introduction to the FA Cup final was to see an object lesson in how the plan is supposed to work: here was a group of men who quite unexpectedly found It Up Them, and they Did Not Like It one bit.

The problem, of course, is that the Big Man can have a distorting effect on England’s football. Any team with a certain style know that the line between archetype and caricature is a fine one, and putting It Up Them is a delicate business. Against halfway competent defences it requires patience and creativity as much as it does willing shoulders and a thick neck, and whether it ends up being Plan A or B, England need to be careful that the emotional resonance of the Big Man doesn’t lead to the entire tournament vanishing in a sigh of misdirected lumps.

But that’s for later; for hindsight, recrimination, and blame. Now is a time for optimism. The Big Men have had their porridge, and they are ready, and England are off to batter the world into submission again. The ravens are still in the Tower, and all is right with Albion.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an England football team in possession of a new manager must be in want of a captain. If there was one consistent theme to Fabio Capello’s time in charge of the Three Lions, it was the endless hemming and hawing over The Armband; ultimately, the FA’s decision that John Terry’s forthcoming trial precluded him leading the team provoked Capello’s resignation, which in turn set the stage for Harry Redknapp, except of course it didn’t.

Now the responsibility falls to Roy Hodgson, and as far as squad harmony goes, he finds himself pretty well zugzwanged. He has to do something, but whatever he does, somebody, somewhere, is going to be seriously peeved.

In his first press conference, Hodgson — in between fielding questions about Redknapp and, unexpectedly, apartheid – ducked the captaincy question, on the not unreasonable grounds that he had absolutely no idea, he’d only been in the job five minutes and he didn’t even know where his desk was or where the pens are kept or that you need to talk to Janet in procurement if your chair’s broken. But it is a question that exercises the press, the players, and the public at large. All we know for sure is that it’s not going to be Terry – the FA was clear on that – and Hodgson doesn’t seem the kind of manager (or the kind of man) to fly in the face of an employer’s edict.

So what to do? Time is ticking, and England’s rivals are announcing their squads, identifying their leaders, and generally giving every impression of being well along the road to readiness.

There are two approaches that Hodgson could take. The first, and perhaps the most obvious, is to sift through the rest of the squad for a Terry-cipher. Steven Gerrard is the obvious favorite, with Scott “Scotty” Parker close behind. Both are redoubtable footballers, and Gerrard would certainly be handy if England drawsOlympiakos in the semifinals. The pair graduated with honors from the traditional English school of leadership (“our students excel in the three S’s: shouting, singing, and shirt-thumping”), and each would doubtless be lauded for his bustle, drive and passion. But leaving aside the fact neither is guaranteed to start in Poland/Ukraine, both fit the template of “England captain” with a weary, almost depressing familiarity.

For too long, The Armband has been a distractingly totemic prize, an Elastic Band of Discord inscribed “For The Bravest”. Choosing another battle sergeant would be conceptual continuity; Hodgson, preciously, has an opportunity to let a little fresh air into the dusty corners of English football, and to redefine the idea of captaincy.

Basically, he needs to give the cursed thing to Joe Hart.

Hart would not be your typical England captain. He’s not his club’s captain, for a start. And, by virtue of his position as well as his personality, he’s not going to be called upon to inspire or energize or any of the other ephemeral responsibilities that captaincy brings; gone would be the curiosity that is “the Captain’s goal.” What he is, though, is (A) a pretty good footballer, (B) an apparently sensible and relatively articulate bloke, and (C) one of only three players guaranteed a first-team place. (The other two are Wayne Rooney and Ashley Cole, one of whom is suspended for the first two games, the other of whom is Ashley Cole.) Hart will play every game, more than likely well, and he’ll even look good in the pregame photographs now that England has abandoned that spearmint shirt atrocity.

Obviously, making the decision on such a basis opens Hart up to the accusation that he is “captain by default.” Yet this, perversely, would be his greatest strength. By doling out The Armband this way, Hodgson would effectively be saying, “Look, obviously we need a captain. Somebody has to toss the coin. But it really isn’t all that important who does it.” There’s a simple way to kill the presumption that the England captain has to be a roaring avatar of Englishness, you know, the veritable lionhearted lovechild of Boadicea and St. George: Just stop presuming.

Further, by diminishing The Armband, Hodgson would also minimize the significance of not being captain: As the symbolism withers away, so too does the sense of rejection. Not being the man who leads his country into battle sounds pretty depressing. But not being the bloke who exchanges pennants? That’s no great hardship.

It might be possible for England just to give the armband to whoever has the most caps from any given XI, like Italy does, but adopting such an approach wouldn’t sit comfortably with a country that still feels the need to have a monarch. The national team should probably reflect the nation, neuroses and all, and ceremonial figureheads matter greatly to this bonkers island. This is why it is imperative that the team find a figurehead as unassuming, as unpretentious, as default as can be.

In short, it needs to stop looking for Henry V and settle for Elizabeth II — in the nicest way possible, Hart is from the pastel suit, pearls, and pillbox hat school of sovereignty. His appointment as captain, rather like Hodgson’s as manager, would represent a modest step toward a less insane England. Give him the armband, let the whole thing simmer down and then pray to King Arthur, Britannia and the Venerable Bede that he doesn’t snap a hamstring.