There's a rumour that after Pardew gets the sack they'll go for Di Canio.

That would be par for the course and perhaps less disastrous than giving the job to our current Director of F****all.

Cardiff seems to have a similarly insane owner to ours. That one's just appointed a 23 year old Khazak friend of his son as chief scout.

Oh dear.

http://www.theguardian.com/football/...-city-disarray

At least your lot haven't changed to playing in red and white stripes.

Yet!

An interesting idea?

http://www.theguardian.com/football/...gue-friendlies

I think it could be.

Hopefully it goes no further than the ideas stage. No doubt there's potentially money in it for UEFA though.

A growing and annoying trend.

I think it could be an interesting idea too, as long as the individual groups were based on rankings. Otherwise, all we'll be watching are the same 4 or 6 teams each time (England, Wales, Scotland, NI, and possibly Rep. of Ireland and France.

At least with a ranking's based system of groups, the potential is there for improving teams to jump up a group on good performances and for poorly playing teams to drop down.

If England want the lucrative games against Brazil or Argentina, they'd need to drastically improve their game then!

Isn't money the primary reason UEFA exists?

Or wait for tectonic drift to speed up. It's for UEFA.

Only the Oinks of this world would find that funny.

The last paragraph in the article states;

The FA and the other big European associations may be among the most difficult to convince of the merits of the plan, because they would have to give up the possibility of lucrative friendlies against big South American sides.

I see your point, as Brazil and Argentina aren't UEFA Nations.

I don't see UEFA sanctioning friendlies against non-UEFA teams though were this to go ahead. UEFA would rather have an extra match under their control.

I see your point, but are friendlies against BR or AR more lucrative for the FA than serious matches against, e.g. Spain, Germany, Holland, Italy or Portugal (together with England, the grauniad's possibly mad suggestion for the First Division)?

I personally think that if the only time you're going to play 2 of the top 5 World Cup sides is during the actual tournament, then there's no point going?

As I've said before somewhere, I think England should go to Brazil with the next generation of players to blood them, but concentrate on getting them to gel as a team for 2018.

Without agreeing or otherwise with your position, who do you think are the next generation of players?

Moreover, there is the small matter of qualifying to go at all.

The Januzajs.