Blues_BCFC

didn’t expect to see jorginho beefing with chappell roan today but sure

Micah Richards, who was sort of an outsider in that England setup being a Man City player at the time, pointed it to a disconnect that came from their club rivalries. It’s why l’ll always say Gareth Southgate is arguably the most important manager England has had. He set a culture of unity and mutual respect. He democratised the Three Lions and obviously, the growth of the Premier League and it meant that more clubs had an input in the national team. It broke the big clubs’ camps where players associated based on the club they represented. See this excerpt from Richard’s’ book; “What made England difficult, then, wasn’t the players as people. It was how divided the squad was by club loyalty. Looking back, the dynamic was absolutely crazy. There was a large group of Manchester United players: Rio Ferdinand, Wayne Rooney, Paul Scholes, Owen Hargreaves, Wes Brown. That was one faction, and probably the dominant one. Then there was a little Liverpool clan, built around Gerrard and Jamie Carragher. There was a Chelsea gang – Terry, Lampard, Ashley Cole, Joe Cole – and another one from Arsenal. “That first evening, when everyone started to arrive at the hotel, could be frosty, especially if we all got together after a big game between two of the big clubs. It would be up to one of the neutrals, someone who wasn’t affiliated to any of the major clans, someone like Jermain Defoe, to try to break the ice, to crack a joke about why they all looked so serious, but there was a limit to what any of us could do. I don’t think we were ever really united enough as a national team to say that everyone in the squad was talking to everyone else. There was always some sort of beef. It never quite passed over into becoming something you could joke about. It ran deeper than one set of players being disappointed to have lost, or another gloating that they had won. There was a genuine sense that, deep down, they didn’t like each other. “That divide defined everything on those England get-togethers. On those trips where we didn’t have our own rooms, the Manchester United players would room with each other. Gerrard and Carragher would room together. The Chelsea players would room together, and the Arsenal players. It was the same at mealtimes. There would be a Liverpool table, a United table, a Chelsea table, an Arsenal table, and they were lines that you did not cross. “Glen Johnson, who was then at Liverpool, couldn’t just wander up and plant himself down next to Rio Ferdinand. That would have been a taboo.” Rio Ferdinand rehashed the same opinion in an interview he granted in the past. “It (club rivalry) killed that England team, that generation. "One year we would have been fighting Liverpool to win the league, another year it would be Chelsea. So I was never going to walk into the England dressing room and open up to Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole, John Terry or Joe Cole at Chelsea, or Steven Gerrard or Jamie Carragher at Liverpool because of the fear they would take something back to their club and use it against us. "I didn't realise that what I was doing was hurting England at the time. I was so engrossed, so obsessed with winning with Man United -- nothing else mattered.'' They had a squad of insanely talented footballers but never managed to have a team until Southgate.

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