England stars are physically and mentally cream-crackered – surely life is too short for these Andorra and Senegal games

The Sun

19 hours ago

WHY do we need to put ourselves through this again?
Why do England have to play Andorra at football, when the basic point of sitting down to watch any football match is to think: 'I wonder who's going to win this one'.
3
We already know that England will win. We know that Andorra are extremely unlikely to score.
And it would be a significant surprise if Jordan Pickford has to make a single meaningful save.
Surely your life is too short to tune in at 5pm on Saturday and watch this thing happen.
This isn't English arrogance. It's not jingoistic or tub-thumping to point out that Andorra has a population of 80,000 - making it slightly bigger than the town of Bracknell but smaller than Weston-Super-Mare.
And therefore, England, with its 57 million people, will always beat it in a football match.
Andorra is a lovely place in the Pyrenees, it's good for skiing and the Andorrans are rightly proud of their tiny nation state.
Not that they currently have a football stadium suitable to hold this World Cup qualifier, which is instead being staged at Espanyol's home ground in Barcelona.
But with players burnt-out, the calendar congested with fixtures and with a month-long Club World Cup about to start, does anyone need this thing - Andorra versus England - to be part of our lives?
3
Over the past 19 years, England have played Andorra six times and beaten them 5-0, 3-0, 2-0, 6-0, 4-0 and 5-0.
The 3-0 in Barcelona was vaguely memorable because Steve McClaren, probably the silliest man ever to manage England, had a hissy fit and stormed out of the post-match press conference.
England star Ivan Toney hits back at Bruno Fernandes with blunt reply after Man Utd star's Saudi transfer snub
But, despite being at the majority of those matches, I can't remember a single thing about any of the rest of them.
So 4-0 to England will be roughly par, even though pretty much everyone will then say that 4-0 is not enough.
There can be a certain sadistic pleasure in witnessing an absolute hiding - a nine or a ten - but that's almost certainly not going to happen either.
It is not that difficult for 11 fit young blokes of lower-tier EFL standard - which is Andorra's level - to sit behind the ball in a packed defence, block shots for 90 minutes and keep the score down, especially if they are showing zero ambition of actually scoring.
In almost 30 years as a recognised international football team, Andorra have never lost by more than 7-0. They aren't that bad.
In the past five years, they have beaten fellow minnows San Marino, Liechtenstein, St Kitts & Nevis and Grenada.
Before that, Andorra defeated Moldova, Macedonia, Albania and Belarus - as well as their one genuine stand-out result, a 1-0 win over Hungary in 2017.
The Nations League has been excellent for smaller nations, giving them regular competitive football against countries of a similar size and teams of similar ability.
Andorra and other postage-stamp nations should not be entirely barred from World Cup qualifying - a pre-qualifying tournament, or Nations League results, could determine that one of them reaches the actual qualifying rounds.
But surely something has to give in the fixture schedule.
And if you're looking for a place to start when cutting fixtures, then how about fixtures that nobody wants to watch and nobody wants to play in?
England's footballers are tired. Very wealthy, yes, but also physically and mentally cream-crackered.
They don't need to spend ten days of their lives preparing to play Andorra and then Senegal - who are, admittedly, half-decent - in a match at Nottingham next Tuesday which will mean absolutely nothing.
I sincerely hope that you have something better to do at 5pm on Saturday than watching this match.
And also that you have something better to do on September 6, when, just three months from now, England will play Andorra yet again.
At some point, we will all reach our deathbeds. And, please believe me, none of us will ever find ourselves staring into that ultimate abyss, wishing that we had spent more of our time watching England play Andorra at football.
3