Playing in a pre-qualifying league with fellow minnows would help them to improve and also benefit more established teams
By no means the first football grandee to assert that playing international cannon fodder such as San Marino ought to be beneath the England team, Gary Lineker was the most recent and high profile. During the Wembley rout on Thursday, the man who served his country with so much distinction mused aloud on social media, tweeting: “Surely we’ve reached the stage where the lowest ranked nations should play among themselves to qualify for the right to play at this level. It’s become absurd.”
While one suspects a younger Lineker would have happily looked past the absurdity of such a mismatch and seen instead an opportunity to fill his Adidas Copa Mundials, the current incarnation seemed unenthused by the spectacle of England piling the hurt on a team who have never won an international match and boast a car salesman and graphic designer among their number. As with much of Lineker’s social media output, responses to his tweet were as plentiful as they were mixed.
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