A bonnet full of bees

What does it matter whether England's overpaid and unbder-talented soccer players sing or not, if they can't beat the likes of the USA and Algeria?

So that's where all the bees have gone: they're shacked up in Raymond Hall's bonnet.

First, before England's dreary one-all World Cup draw with the USA, he told us he would be rooting for the Americans. Then (News & Star, June 15 - incidentally, my 75th birthday), he chuntered on about the English lads not singing "God Save the Queen".

Despite his obsession with things American (I once noticed that he spells "aeroplane" as "airplane"), he should surely know that the dirge he'd like the English boys to bellow is the British national anthem. England does not have one of its own, and I doubt that football fans in the other three lands that comprise the United Kingdom give a toss whether the lads sing the national anthem or "Knees Up, Mother Brown", and still less whether they win the World Cup, which looks most unlikely.

I recall sitting, in 1967, amid the tartan hordes at Wembley when Scotland beat England by three goals to one, a year after the home side had won the World Cup. The Jocks said that showed they were the world champions, and, heavily outnumbered, I didn't argue, but, telling anyone who'd listen that my middle name is Innes, swigged on the bottles they thrust upon me.

Subsequently the Scots were banned from playing England at Wembley, because of their fans' violent drunken behaviour on their forays over the border, ostensibly to watch soccer. Now, it's the England fans whose impending arrival gets shopkeepers in Europe and elsewhere putting up their shutters, or boarding up their windows, while the now well-behaved Jocks are welcomned everywhere. Could this be a product of devolution, or a sign of the decline of Scottish football internationally? 

Perhaps we should be pleased to see England's miserably incompetent millionaires return, potless, after the Slovenia match. At least, as someone said on the radio the other day, there may be fewer boys christened Wayne, if that happens, and we may be saved from having to look at that eyesore cross of St George until Christmas.

Meanwhile, in the light of the £6 million-a-year Signor Capello's BP-like mismanagement I'm telling nobody else that if my grandma had been my grandpa, I would have been Mike Marzicani, the ice cream billionaire.