LISTEN to some of the gloomier prognoses that have been put forward this week, and you could be forgiven for thinking that international football is in its final throes. Tedious, predictable, lacking in quality. The phrase “international break” has assumed deeply negative undertones.

Well guess what, international football isn’t dead, in fact it’s arguably more vibrant and relevant than ever. It’s just that we only ever view it through English eyes. And at the moment, it’s easy to understand why those eyes are generally half-closed.

I was at both of England’s matches last week and if you thought they were bad on the television, I can assure you they were even more depressing in the flesh. This is a desperately poor England side, yet they have waltzed through qualifying without ever really looking like losing. They deserve credit for that, and Gareth Southgate can rightly take pride in having overseen a successful qualification despite having inherited a shambles when he took over from Sam Allardyce.

It has hardly been riveting stuff though, and if you’re a fan of one of the leading Premier League clubs, I can fully understand why you might find an England double-header against Slovenia and Lithuania an unwanted distraction when Liverpool are set to take on Manchester United once the domestic action resumes.

But despite the impression you might well get from watching Sky Sports or reading the national press, football doesn’t begin and end with the Premier League’s big six. In fact, in the context of the wider world, it doesn’t even have much to do with England either. As a nation that has reached two major semi-finals in the last 51 years, we’re hardly in a position to start suggesting that the whole of international football should be arranged to suit us.

Remove your parochial blinkers, and there were gripping stories all over the place last week. How about Panama qualifying for their first major finals with just about the last kick of the game in a 2-1 win over Costa Rica? The Panamanian president declared a national holiday because he deemed the achievement to have been so momentous. Try telling him and his citizens that international football doesn’t matter.

A little further south, and Lionel Messi was cementing his status as the greatest footballer of all time as his hat-trick booked Argentina’s place in Russia in the final round of South American qualifiers. Argentina would have missed out had they lost in Ecuador, but Messi’s magic powered them through. The drama as they conceded a first-minute opener was tangible though.

The action just kept on coming. In Africa, it was Mohamed Salah scoring a last-minute penalty to guarantee Egypt’s first participation at a World Cup finals for almost 30 years. The European matches produced a host of great tales, whether it was Iceland becoming the smallest nation ever to qualify for the World Cup, European champions Portugal triumphing in a dramatic winner-takes-all encounter against Switzerland or the Republic of Ireland edging out Wales to claim a play-off place.

Then, in surely the most politically-charged story of all, Syria suffered an extra-time defeat to Australia in an Asian confederation play-off. Tim Cahill, still going strong, scored both of the goals for the Aussies.

Ah, some will say, but how can international football survive when the best club teams can beat the national side from the country they’re playing in. That’s a valid argument, but again it’s only of relevance in a small handful of countries.

Yes, either Manchester club would almost certainly beat England. Barcelona would probably beat Spain, and Paris St Germain look better on paper than France. Head away from Europe’s four or five biggest leagues though, and the international game remains the dominant force.

Take Poland, for example, where powerful club rivalries are set aside and ignored to support the national team. A national team, by the way, that is a damn sight better than Legia Warsaw. Or any of the former Soviet republics, such as Lithuania where I visited this week, where the national football team is regarded as a powerful source of post-Communist identity and inter-ethnic cohesion.

We might be quite blasé about what the England team means to us, or what it means to qualify for another major tournament, but there are plenty of other nations who regard punching above their weight on the international stage as a source of huge pride.

Anyone who spent any time amongst Wales supporters at last summer’s European Championships in France would have been left in no doubt as to the importance of international football in that country. The same was true of Northern Ireland. Or the Republic. Or Iceland.

We are fortunate in this country to be able to watch one of the most exciting domestic leagues in the world – note that I pointedly avoided calling it ‘the best’ – but there are huge swathes of the world where a domestic interest in football effectively begins and ends with the national team.

It might be worth remembering that the next time an international break gets in the way of Sky being able televise Stoke against Bournemouth. Football exists outside the Premier League bubble, and the international version remains the most powerful and wide-reaching of all.


The Northern Echo:


MARTIN GRAY’S departure from Darlington probably became inevitable when his frustrations boiled over in the summer, and it is easy to see why some Quakers fans were incensed by his attempts to bring Raj Singh back into the fold given the former chairman’s previous failings.

Step back to see the bigger picture though, and Gray deserves nothing but praise for the way in which he dragged Darlington back from the brink, securing three promotions in the space of four years to guide the club from the Northern League to the brink of the Conference.

The current campaign has not gone to plan, and there comes a time in any manager’s lifespan when a change is probably required to freshen things up. That shouldn’t detract from the quality of Gray’s achievements though, or lead to questions about his commitment to the club.

There have been plenty of previous occasions when he could have walked away, but he chose to remain in order to restore Darlington to something approaching an even keel. The likes of David Hodgson and Brian Little will always have a special place in the affection of Quakers fans, but given the problems he was forced to endure, Gray can justifiably claim to have been the club’s greatest ever boss.