By Alan Duffy
Paul Ince has a point! (about England players having questionable attitudes, that is.)
QPR’s new full-back Luke Young has spoken about his decision to retire from international football in 2009, pointing the finger at Fabio Capello in the process.
“Players would drop out and then I would get the call (to play) two days later than everyone else,” he blubs. “If I’d been treated better, would I have stuck at it? Yes.”
It gets worse for poor Lukey Wukey: “One time I was having dinner with my family on the Tuesday and they were flying out on the Wednesday morning and Ashley Cole pulled out and they asked me to go out to Doha, ” he explains. ” That was the time when I felt – ‘Do I need this any more?’
And finally, he says: “Stephen Warnock went all the way out there, sat on the bench, didn’t get on and that probably would have happened to me again. It would have been the fourth, fifth, sixth time of that happening. I just felt a little bit disheartened that I wasn’t really being taken seriously for the position.”
Maybe it’s just me, but shouldn’t players be honoured even to sit on the bench for their country? With footballers at the top level making so much money from the game, surely representing your country, be it on the pitch or on the bench, is a way of giving something back? Even older players such as Paul Scholes – should they really choose when to retire?
Anyway, Young is nothing more than an average player anyway so the Three Lions are better off without him.