Home Nations tournament to return

Last year was dire for English football. We performed ineptly at the World Cup and our bid to host the 2018 tournament was humiliatingly dismissed by FIFA.

Our domestic game was increasingly crowded with overseas players at clubs owned by foreign nationals. Owners who can’t wait to take their teams matches around the world.

I thought our national game was in trouble. In danger of being irreparably ruined. I’ll admit I was worried. Luckily the Football Association have acted decisively to stop the rot. They’ve brought back the British Home Championship.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Surely we should be sorting out the coaching system so our young players can cut it domestically let alone internationally.

Surely we should be putting in place new rules about the ownership of clubs so that the fans, and the local communities from which those clubs sprang, don’t play second fiddle to global marketing drives.

And yes, they’re probably the things that should happen. They’re eminently sensible ideas, but they would be a bit difficult to do. It might take some thinking, and it’d be one of things you have to keep diligently working on rather than let fizzle out quietly until everyone forgets about it.

But these foreign countries haven’t been playing fair for years. They keep producing these technically and tactically superior players and it’s got to the point where it’s just a lot simpler if we don’t play with them any more.

Make no mistake national pride is at stake. If they won’t let us run the World Cup we should just bloody show them how it’s done and run our own damn tournament. One we can definitely qualify for without too much trouble. In fact we’ll make qualification automatic. Just try and stop us Sepp Blatter.

So now the time has come. The time to close the borders and seal ourselves off from the rest of the global game. We need to be the North Korea of world football. Because the British Home Championship is the perfect solution for English football. It’ll give us the chance to be a big fish in a small pond. Admittedly a stagnant pond that the rest of the world doesn’t care about. It’s like what they say about drowning. It’s actually a delightful sensation after your stop struggling.