A weekend review of a weekend of partial football.
There was still football to be found despite the international break.
Sports newsrooms were faced this weekend with a dilemma that now punctuates every football season more than once. It’s international break weekend; what are we going to do? The good news for football weekend reviewers the length and breadth of the nation is that there were things to talk about, it’s just that the standard practice of writing 1,800 words on Manchester United being hilariously dreadful before remembering that shit, there were another nine matches in the Premier League and then remembering that SHIT, there were 35 games in the EFL as well.
So where do we start? With England beating Australia at Wembley on Friday night? Well, this was a match that definitely took place, and it is a match that England definitely won. Other than that, there wasn’t a great deal to say about this one other than that if this was effectively an England second-string eleven, the first-string won’t be losing much sleep over the possibility of losing their places in the team.
After the match, Gareth Southgate claimed not to understand why Jordan Henderson was booed, which is a somewhat unusual take when it should have been perfectly obvious that Henderson was going to be taunted over becoming the poster boy for the Saudi regime. Southgate was playing with fire when he decided to stick with Henderson. It’s not anybody else’s fault that he didn’t know that sticking your hand into open flames can get uncomfortable.
If Southgate was soiling himself in the cause of sportswashing on Friday night, at least the FA didn’t make a mess of things before the match when they confirmed that they would be lighting the Wembley arch in the colours of the Israeli flag. Much as it’s tempting to look at the number of tweets expressing outrage at this lack of ‘support’, it is highly likely that this decision spared the FA a shitstorm from which it would have taken them an age to emerge. To show respect for the innocent who have died is completely understandable, and by erring on the side of caution the FA have spared all of us weeks and weeks of unpleasant and tedious ‘debate’ that we all did well to avoid.
On the matter of actual football matches played over the actual weekend itself, pickings were slim. Scotland lost to Spain despite a VAR break about the same length as a cigarette break and Northern Ireland stuck another coin in the respirator for their chances of qualifying for the Euros with a to-be-expected win against San Marino, but the big story of the weekend came from the Cardiff City Stadium, where goals from Harry Wilson helped Wales to a 2-1 win against Croatia which rather did for the ‘fin de siecle’ argument surrounding the Welsh team since the retirement of Gareth Bale and the team’s underachieving performance at the 2022 World Cup.
Wales must now beat Armenia away and Turkey at home in their final two qualifiers on the 18th and 21st of November to secure their place at next summer's tournament in Germany at Croatia's expense, and even if they fail to do this they have the fall-back option of the play-offs, though Armenia are their penultimate opponents and would go above them on goal difference if they win that match.
Each game is critical. Lose the Armenia game and suddenly even third place and a place in the play-offs is in the balance. Win that, and the Turkey game becomes a straight fight for second place which Wales would be the favourites to win. Put briefly, head coach Rob Page seems to have spent most of 2023 seeking to silence those who were savage in their criticism of him at the very end of 2022, and it’s difficult to argue that he isn’t winning that argument. Wales could yet be making an appearance in Germany next summer.
Meanwhile back in the EFL, there was a time when international breaks would result in a tiny number of Championship matches being postponed while everybody else replied with, ‘Oh lah-di-dah, who do they think they are, with their international players?’ Of course, those days are long gone now and the idea of having a Tongan international playing on the wing for Athletico Bumstead in the North-Southern Counties Division Three is no longer even a novelty, just a quietly pleasing fact of life.
Four games survived the cut in League One, but—perhaps unsurprisingly—none of them were of much consequence. The hundreds of Leyton Orient supporters who made the long march north to Carlisle were rewarded with a 1-0 win which, in the absence of many other teams playing, pushed them up to 10th place in the table. They’ve now lost just two of their last eight games after losing the first three, and are just three points off a play-off place. With Portsmouth and Oxford, neither of whom played, having already opened up a bit of a gap in the top two places, they’re well positioned for the scrap below to come. The other three games saw Blackpool brush aside fifth-placed Stevenage to jump to seventh, Cambridge and Shrewsbury cancel each other out, and Burton Albion leap to mid-table with a 1-0 win at Lincoln.
League Two managed much better, with only one game—between Morecambe and Crawley Town—falling foul of the international break. Stockport County went top of the table with a 3-1 win at Harrogate Town after Notts County were surprisingly hammered 4-1 at home by Mansfield Town, who jumped up to third place themselves. Fourth place is held by Crewe Alexandra, who beat Tranmere Rovers. For their part, Tranmere are fourth-bottom on the table, jointly on ten points alongside Colchester United and Forest Green Rovers. Forest Green got some catching up done with a 5-0 win over Colchester but there was no such respite for Sutton United, who dropped back to the bottom of the table with a 4-1 defeat at Doncaster Rovers, just a week after they ended a run without a win which stretched back by beating Walsall 4-0.
All of which leaves the Fourth Qualifying Round of the FA Cup. Many of you will already be aware of the fact that I was at the match between Worthing and Bath City, but the big news of the day came elsewhere. The big headline of the day came with Cray Valley Paper Mills and their 5-2 win against Enfield Town (everyone loves a club with a name that’s a bit different), but there were other surprises too, most notably at Hartlepool, who were beaten 2-0 at home by Chester, Halifax Town, were were beaten 1-0 at home by Marine, Hereford, who beat Rochdale 1-0, Horsham, who beat Dorking Wanderers 2-0, and Yeovil, who beat Southend United 2-0. A notable mention also to the Suffolk village of Needham Market (population 4,500), who went to the city of York (population 141,000) and came away with a goalless draw. They now replay for the right to travel to Chester in the First Round.
Oh, and Sheikh Jassim has pulled out of the race to buy Manchester United, which is probably good news if there is a fight still to be had against sportswashing, but which also renders the last eleven months of the existence of United even more of an irrelevance than it already was and leaves the club kind of where it started, but with Jim Ratcliffe now poised to take a slice of that sweet, sweet money pie too. And the joint UK & Ireland bid for Euro 2028 has been confirmed. I’ve seen nothing in recent years to dissuade me from my theory that the proliferation of low-cost flights has made countries more reluctant to host major tournaments. So far, Euro 2028 has really felt like The Tournament that No-one Wanted.