Roll Up, Roll Up for England

Huddled at the end of platform 4, Doncaster station are a group of odd looking men. A gaggle of ill-fitting jeans, unknowingly retro sportswear present whatever the weather and bedecked with binoculars, Dictaphones and notepads. The thing about trainspotters is that they are pretty much just a concentrated version of everyman. Eventually all men reach a certain age where they begin to develop an unhealthy fascination in one area. It may be trains, it may be cars, it may be birds, it may even be a personal quest to make the council alter that incorrect road sign by the roundabout. Now I am nearer thirty than twenty I am becoming one of these men and I believe I have identified the object of my odd fascination; I think its the England football team.

To me the England football team is becoming the equivalent of a roadside fire on the opposite carriageway of a motorway. I know it has nothing to do with me and it won't affect me in anyway, but I still can't fight the urge to slow down and have a bloody good gawp. They have a wealth of talented players led by a succession of (Steve McClaren and Kevin Keegan aside) established managers and yet thanks to weighty and often unrealistic expectations they never quite hit it off; if they were a band they would have split up over musical differences round about 1973.

The latest reason to stare across the central reservation comes from England's stand in captain Rio Ferdinand. (As a brief aside has anyone else noticed how Rio's lips appear to be moving completely independent of his body, flapping around like a couple of caterpillars clinging to a leaf in a strong breeze) Speaking at a press conference earlier Rio confirmed what many of us had known for a long time of the England squad's reputation under previous managers. "We became a bit of a circus, in terms of the whole WAG situation," he told the assembled journalists, and Ray Stubbs.

The 'circus' atmosphere at England team get-togethers had been a well known problem amongst many insiders, even before mobile phone footage of Victoria Beckham and Cheryl Cole performing a trapeze act in the dining hall at Bisham Abbey made it onto YouTube. This was at a time when reports had begun to appear in the tabloids about Alex Curran's irritating habit of clumsily wandering round the team hotel and making quick changes of direction whilst carrying a particularly long plank of wood. And of course their had long been pressure from the FA preventing the media from publishing stories about Colleen McLoughlin having to subdue husband Wayne Rooney using a whip and a dining room chair.

Although Rio was quick to criticise the circus nature of the England teams wives and girlfriends the players themselves were not without exception, with David Beckham regularly arriving for training on the back of an elephant whilst simultaneously spinning a couple of plates. The final straw for all came in England's defeat against Croatia last Autumn when physio Gary Lewin went on to treat Joe Cole only to find that his medical bag was filled with confetti. This incident capped a woeful night for England which had begun when the entire squad arrived at Wembley crammed inside an old jalopy which subsequently fell apart as it parked inside the stadium, with Steve McClaren left standing forlorn in a pair of over-sized shoes and trousers clutching a useless car door