trevor ford, john burridge. i can't be arsed knowing about foreign players in foreign leagues. none of it is important. del piero? who cares? i've heard of del monte and delboy trotter.
The 3 players to play at 40.. Gordon Strachen Teddy Sheringham Kevin Phillips Bryan Robson retired 10 days short of his 40th And Deano was 39.
There must be a few keepers who are 40 that have played, as mentioned Burridge. Schwarzer is still knocking about, Van Der Sar & Brad Friedel that I can think of, oh hang on was it outfield players?
I had forgotten about France 98. Ok so whats 2 years eh ? Lol. Well spotted though chaps. You just dont see Scotland, Wales, N.I. getting anywhere near another major tournament for years sadly.
Considering Wales and Scotland are the bottom two in their WC group, I think we may be waiting a while for those two. I'd expect to see ROI in 2016 for certain.
Extending the finals tournament to 24 teams will make a lot of the qualifiers meaningless - 24 is close to half of all the countries affiliated to UEFA. It might be time to seed some countries direct to the finals and thus reduce fixture congestion. Or even have a two-tier competition: one for the likes of Spain, Germany, France, Italy, England etc and another for Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Faroe Islands and Scotland...
this enlarging all the comps is bloody annoying.. just to ensure EVERY major nation is involved to please the TV started with the good old European Cup, which Clough treated as a "jolly"... you wouldn't imagine a CL final of Nottingham Forest vs Malmo these days (even if it was a crap match), anyone else getting bored with the same old names every year in the CL?
Joking aside, enlarging the Euros to 24 teams does raise that subject again of club v country. It will probably mean that in the qualifying groups it will be the top 2 teams going through automatically with the third placed teams from each group competing in the play-offs. That means more meaningless games as effectively some countries wil have qualified with 2 or 3 games still left to play. This then raises the question of weakened teams as clubs put pressure on international managers to rest key players. I don't think EUFA have thought this through.
