VIENTI, June 06/10

Very Important England National Team Information
Well, the domestic season has ended, and that means—at least in 2010—all attention is on the World Cup finals. England had a couple of warm-up games that mean little but were of course poured over and speculated on by seven zillion inches of newspaper and Internet column inches.

May 24, 2010; Wembley Stadium, Northwest London, England
England 3 Mexico 1

May 29, 2010; UPC-Arena, Graz, Austria
Japan 1 England 2

I personally do not get het up about these “friendlies.” If you win 6-0 and 6-0, then people start saying, well, the World Cup might as well be given to us now; if you play badly or so-so (as was the case in both games), then the naysayers start calling for blood, and there is the real and stupid risk of injury. The football bosses will say that these game give the manager a chance to see who his final 23 players will be, but he knows that anyway. No, this is more revenue-generating that anything else.
So, on Monday, June 1, manager Fabio Capello announced his final squad who will fly to South Africa from Austria, where they trained (in case you were thinking that Graz is an odd place for Japan to meet England). Out of the provisional squad are West Ham hero Scott Parker, who was always an outside chance of being picked anyway, but remaining in are goalkeeper Robert Green and defender Matthew Upson.
All the action and stomach butterflies begin on June 11, and England’s first game (in the group stage of three games) is against a little-known nation called the United States of America. If you’re going, get there 90 minutes before the 2:30 p.m. EST kick-off, as I guarantee you every pub in Manhattan showing it will be mobbed and hysterical.
On a side note, the one Mexican goal scored against England was scored by Guillermo Franco, a West Ham player…well, he was for less than 24 hours following his admittedly weak goal, but then the Hammers decided not to renew his contract. This had nothing to do with the goal, but it is indicative of something that I cannot quite work out.