Someone put a poll out on Twitter recently asking if you'd prefer to see England win the World Cup or your team win the League. An Aston Villa fan replied that he'd rather see us win a corner over anything to do with England. I did chuckle at that.
And I know I come round to this every time there is a break for international football, but it's essentially pointless and the FA and by association all of us have made it so much bigger than what it needs to be. I actually think Ben White knows the score. It's a waste of his time and probably impacts his ability to perform for his employers.
And him not playing for England means he gets more time with his family and he doesn't have to deal with everything else that comes with it when the side lose. But I understand why some like it and in June or July when Euro 2024 is taking place, I'll be watching as much, if not more, than the next man.
But wouldn't it be fun if instead of picking the best players that play professionally, if the players were picked by players that were not getting paid for it?
All that said, I'll be watching as many games as I can this summer and if that happens to be England, so be it.
And I do hope England go on to win it, but I suspect our manager will over complicate things instead of sending out the best 11 on form and having the opposition needing to adapt to us. And this is just my view and it wont be shared by everyone.
But you've all probably heard of the infinite monkey theorem right? You give a monkey a typewriter and unlimited time, the monkey will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. I think that's the logic the FA have applied to Southgate.
That or they actually don't have a real plan.
The thing is, there is less than a one in a trillion chance that if we gave 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 monkeys a typewriter each at the time of the bing bang and they typed away at random until today, that one of them would type any particular document a mere 79 characters long.
Yes, I could have written that number differently, but it's written for effect. And I'm not saying Gareth Southgate and England are not going to win Euro 2024, this is me saying I think Gareth Southgate would be a great choice for the next manager of Manchester United.
Wolves at the weekend
I hope I'm wrong about the above, but it doesn't matter. Not really.
What matters is this weekend and we have Wolves at Villa Park on Saturday. And Spurs have Luton a little earlier in the day, so there will be pressure. By the time we kick off, we'd have played the same number of games as Spurs and we are either going to be on the same points or two or three points ahead.
The need for a win on Saturday is real, whatever way you look at it. I just hope the players that have gone away to play come back with the necessary amount of energy to put in the type of performance needed.
The weekend matters. I'll be back then.