After barely scraping past Andorra, a country so small it’s surprising they could find 11 men of the right age to play, the manager of the English football team announced today he had a new plan for the team’s future.
“From now on,” said Thomas Tuchel, “to play in the England team, you must be the son of someone who played in it before.
“It’s been standard practice in the film industry for years. They used to do a thing called ‘auditioning’, where they would take actors, even complete unknowns, and test them to see if they were any good.” This revelation had younger journalists googling to check if it was true, since it’s never happened in their lifetimes.
”These days, of course, they simply ask established stars if they have any children who might fancy giving acting a go. And if they’re worried about bad publicity, they provide them with a standard template saying ‘If anything, I had to be twice as good as everyone else just to prove I was there on merit’, ready to be fed to a tame journalist.”
This unfortunately spelled bad news for players like Phil Foden. “Sorry, mein Freund, it’s not that you haven’t been really impressive for England over the last few years. But your dad’s a plumber, for God’s sake.”
Meanwhile Steve Hurst, grandson of England’s 1966 World Cup final hero Geoff Hurst, said he was very surprised to get the call.
“Still, I’d been considering making a change from accountancy for a while, it was starting to feel a bit stale. Granted, I’d been thinking more in terms of insurance or banking rather than representing my country at a sport I haven’t played since I was at school, and wasn’t good at even then. But that’s the thing about life in Wokingham - you just never know what’s going to happen next.”
Image: jarmoluk - Pixabay
