Is International Football Still Relevant?

Club v country is an embittered row that keeps on bubbling...

Nov 25, 2008

Somewhere in the region of 7,000 English fans were in Berlin last Wednesday night to see their side record a 2-1 victory over their German hosts.

7,000 is an extraordinary number of fans who are willing to fork out a couple of grand to trek across Europe for a game that Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Rio Ferdinand and co. didn't deem important enough to risk their weekend return to club colours for.

Listen to Sir Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger and they'll tell you that it's the club who pays the wages, albeit not always in so many words. And they're right. If you're a builder contracted by a firm and you fall off the scaffold doing a bit of Saturday work for the sister-in-law, your bosses aren't going to be too happy.

And they have a very valid point. International friendlies, however, are not a waste of time. Just as club football is a results business, International football is the same. If Fabio Capello doesn't try out Gabriel Agbonlahor or Gareth Barry or Matthew Upson in Berlin, when does he do it? In a World Cup Qualifier when they don't perform, and the cost is three points? End result is the p45 for the Italian.

Nothing in Ireland stokes the fires like a World Cup campaign. Packie Bonner's penalty save in 1990 was watched by virtually the entire country. Ray Houghton's off-balance effort evading the stretch of Pagliuca in the Giants Stadium provided many a first footballing memory. Robbie Keane's equaliser against Germany in 2002 evoked particularly memorable images of three fully grown, shamrock-clad men in floods of tears in the Orient.

International football still has the power to do that. Roy Keane once called the Old Trafford crowd 'prawn sandwich' men. He was right. Old Trafford on a match day, particularly a Saturday afternoon, can give off the same atmosphere as 90 minutes at church.

Most club fans have no particular affinity to the club they call their own. United fans have been on the receiving end of most of the abuse given their worldwide appeal, but it's true that someone in Lurgan or Aberdeen or Cardiff can't have the same emotional bond to a club as someone who wakes up in the morning with Old Trafford in one side of the bed and Eastlands in the other.

International football is different. You're Irish, you're English, you're Welsh, Scottish, American, German, whatever you are, it is your team. In the way that club football divides, international football unites. Geordies, Scousers, Mancs, Cockneys, all become one down Wembley way when the three lions are plastered on the chest of the men for whose blood they cry week in, week out.

In a way, it shows how fickle a game it really is. Or maybe it shows how strange human emotion can be. But if there were no national teams, what would you do every second summer?

The copyright of the article Is International Football Still Relevant? in International Soccer is owned by Cahair O'Kane. Permission to republish Is International Football Still Relevant? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.