Just football, I suppose.

 

                                                                      Ron Flowers

I am a proper football fan, I've been a fan for so many years that it is ridiculous always following the same football team. As with other, and fair weather, fans I enjoyed 'The Euros' and the England football team. I liked the manager, or the coach, as they say these days, Gareth Southgate, even though I think he should have picked a better team as he had brilliant players on the bench. 

In fact three of the best players, in the team, were the three who missed penalties. Rashford, for example, hit the most perfect penalty apart from it being one inch to the left. The perfect penalty is to send the goalkeeper the wrong way and he was unlucky.

Marcus Rashford will probably end up being the Prime Minister, one day, with the work he does away from football. But one of the things Southgate didn't consider was that Rashford needed shoulder surgery and, if he had known he was not going to be used at all he could have had the surgery instead. As it is he has to miss a few matches with Manchester United at the start of the season which starts in a week or two.

It's strange for me, being basically Irish, following the England football team but if they played Ireland it would be Ireland I would be shouting for.

My son asked me, the other day, what I learned on the first day at school and I told him that I found out I was Irish. Arriving there, after a lot of protesting on my part, I found that the kids didn't speak like me. They spoke with Birmingham accents and would always ask me what I was saying. I would say 'for' and they would hear 'far' and I needed to be understood and, more to the point, children can be cruel. It's inherent in us as humans, we are cruel to strange things and things we don't understand and as we grow up we become tolerant and hopefully not selfish. So, I blended in. 

Now one thing I didn't like about the final was the fact that when the England team were given their runners up medals, a lot of them removed them from around their neck. They should have been proud of them especially as they weren't the second best team in the competition.

When you see the Olympic Games on the TV, you will see the silver medallist celebrate their medals, especially in the relays, maybe because they realise what sportsmanship is, what winners are.

The little fella from England, who won gold in the synchronized diving recently, won his gold medal at the fourth attempt. Tessa Saunderson, the British Gold Medallist in 1984, didn't get gold at the first attempt and the reason England football teams have only won the world cup once is that they try too hard without enjoying the game – hey it's a 'game!!'

When I watched football as a child supporting Aston Villa, whilst a lot of my pals supported Birmingham City, what my brother calls Small Heath, those players had other jobs. They would finish at the end of the season and go back to a regular job in the summer. The most they would earn, per week, would be about £20 which, is around $30.

I saw a movie about the World Cup of 1950 and they portrayed the English players as toffs – no they were working class men with working class accents, not speaking as if they had a plum in their mouths. It was an American film about the American team who had beaten England 1-0, the goal coming off the back of the head by one of the American team – but they won, fair and square. I remember a line in the movie saying that the Americans were only getting around $50 per week. A bit of research would have revealed that the English players were probably on $15.

Those were the players I watched and enjoyed and they were my heroes and later when they started to earn big money a pal of mine wouldn't go to see them any more and would prefer to watch schools football where, maybe, it was the gig kids who shone.

But I know why he did it. We used to live in Wellington Shropshire and I followed Wellington Town Football Team. They had a proper stadium and were a non-league team. Later they became Telford United when the name of the place was changed from Wellington. We followed them to Wembley in the challenge cup and the team was managed by Ron Flowers, who was in the England World Cup Squad in 1966.

These days money runs football, billionaires just buy a team and think it's clever but it's not.