From the photo you can probably tell what my feelings on international break are. It’s not that I have a vendetta against the concept, per se, and I know that a lot of people enjoy watching these breaks. The biggest events in world football, after all, involve national teams rather than clubs. But – and here’s another clue as to my beef with internationals – guess when those are played?
Yeah. Summer.
The name itself speaks a thousand words – break. This implies a break in proceedings, a break from something that hitherto was working perfectly smoothly. For a week or two, players are yanked from their surroundings, thrown together in a gaggle of people they’ve presumably been playing against, play a couple of games, then are sent back to play against each other once more. This just really doesn’t sound like a workable situation to me. It’s not like the players derive any additional benefit from working together as a national team for a few days – to gel with a team, to do something coherent, you’ve got to stay together every day for quite a while, and these random short breaks within domestic season don’t offer that. Summer training does, summer tournaments do. This is like studying for your A Levels only on the first Sunday of every month; it just doesn’t really make sense.
In fact, it doesn’t even sound like it’s got much of a purpose. I suppose I would understand if it’s qualifiers and therefore being played with a purpose, but half of the games just seem to be friendlies. That’s nice. You get to play teams you wouldn’t usually get to play. But at the same time, really? You’re going to suspend domestic season and risk injuries just so that you can fly somewhere, be introduced to someone new, shake hands, say “hello”, play 90 minutes, and then fly back? Someone bring Alexander Armstrong and Richard Osman in, I think I’ve found the sporting version of Pointless!
There’s the third reason up there I’ve mentioned – injuries. OK, so maybe friendlies could be useful in the sense of measuring yourself against other teams (although I still don’t agree). But more often than not international breaks become literal, in the sense that there are very many things breaking apart and breaking down. It’s not been bad this particular break – the only injury I can think of is Claudio Marchisio, although it turns out that wasn’t as bad as previously thought, and Chris Smalling, who again seems fit to play this Saturday anyhow. But previous international breaks have seemed like a supernatural being stuck a bunch of football players in maracas and then had a fantabulous musical party having forgotten all about them. Once it opens the maracas again they troop out – hamstring, ankle, so on and so forth. And their domestic season is completely ruined, their club’s probably heavily impacted. This isn’t fair to either them or their teams.
Even if no players are injured, it does take the wind out of the sails of clubs who’ve been having a good run. United, for example, were doing excellently prior to this week – you don’t get much better than dominating Liverpool at Anfield – but now that they’ve been interrupted, I fear for how much momentum will be lost. This isn’t just for teams whose players have been called up – when international break kicks in the whole league stops, so this affects everyone.
The solution? Stop playing internationals in the middle of the season. There’s all summer to do that – there’s more time, more space for the team to gel, more reason to play, less “consequence” if a player gets injured (not that I’m saying players getting injured isn’t horrible – it is, one way or the other, but there’s less repercussions for his career and for his team). You really want a break? Have a kit kat instead.
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