SIDELINE CUT:Portsmouth teeter on the brink and England's World Cup hopes seem gripped in a
melodramatic farce, writes KEITH DUGGAN

THE VANITIES of England’s football culture have been exposed in recent weeks but one question is worth asking as Fabio Capello struggles to prevent his international team replacing Eastenders as the best soap opera going: Why isn’t Wayne Rooney the captain of the Bounty?

The sad demise of Portsmouth football club gives substance to the argument that sooner or later, the Premier League is going to be exposed as a house of cards. For years now, the modest but vital provincial clubs that are there in the main to provide fodder for the super clubs of English football, have been forced to spend recklessly to secure the services of relatively ordinary players just so they can survive in the top flight.

Portsmouth are almost certain to have nine points docked, which will virtually eliminate them from the desperate and always entertaining relegation dance at the bottom of the Premier League table.

The comments from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and of local MPs declaring the importance of football to the city do not really matter. Portsmouth are replaceable and can sink into the lower tiers of the English leagues, as once mighty Leeds have done.

Week after week, on Sky’s interminable football coverage or on the slickly packaged MOTD shows on the BBC, the camera angles cannot hide the empty seats in the edge-of-town stadiums where the main business is to survive in the big league.

The infusion of money from Sky television has done a lot of good for English football. It is slightly shocking now to see the pictures of 1980s games, with the fans penned in behind wire cages in scarcely human conditions. Football stadia have been transformed and exotic players were attracted to unlikely English cities by the promise of the new money that flooded into the game. There is no sign of that money disappearing: the €1.2 billion windfall resulting from Sky’s newly negotiated overseas rights package extends the bonanza time for English clubs. But even so, clubs are struggling to contain the ballooning running costs.

Nobody really blinked when clubs like Manchester United and Liverpool – supposedly the jewels in the crown of England’s football heritage – were forced to relinquish boardroom control to American investors with no emotional attachment to either the football clubs or the cities which they made famous.

There was something desperately touching about the signs the fans made when the Glazers took control at Old Trafford: Manchester United is not for sale. But it was floated on the stock exchange. For sale is precisely what it was and is.

There are rumblings of financial discontent on the horizon for Manchester United, now saddled with debts of €784 million, even as the current team flies high in both the domestic league and Europe. However long Alex Ferguson remains as Gaffer, you get the sense he will be baling out at the right time. At corporate level, United have extended the stadium and put the executive boxes in place and developed a flawless marketing strategy which guarantees their stadium is full and their merchandise is globally recognisable and still find themselves sailing into a financial storm.

Liverpool have managed to snatch a Champions League through a period when they have seemed on the ropes as a football club, finally succumbing to the requirement to pass control on to a moneyed owner from afar, constantly delaying their planned move to a plush new stadium up the road from Anfield and bringing a flabbergasting combination of players through the doors in an attempt to find the right combination for that elusive league title, a trophy that once seemed like second nature to their existence.

I often wonder how Jimmy Hill, the man who ended the maximum wage in English football, must feel about the state of the game today. Hill has lived through a period when football stars were treated like indentured servants by their paymasters to the other extreme which prevails today, when the players send their agents in to wring every last penny they can from the clubs. The players cannot be blamed. It was their good fortune to be born into extraordinary times in English football where a decent if unspectacular professional can earn €110,000 a week for mere competency.

Such vast wealth is bound to affect the mindset of the young men on whom it is bestowed. Two or three seasons into their football lives, young apprentices have acquired all the stuff they could humanly want, they are financially set for retirement and, out of boredom as much as anything, are drawn to the glitter of disposable celebrity.

All the signs were there during the ludicrous circus that overshadowed England’s World Cup effort in Germany in 2006. The gimlet-eyed Fabio Capello was supposed to come in and kill that culture but now, just months before England’s latest bid for the Fifa World Cup trophy, the Italian finds himself watching three key members of his full-back line caught up in the kind of soap opera that puts Coronation Street in the ha’penny place.

Already, Capello has had to sack his first choice captain, John Terry, which is not exactly a glowing endorsement of his own judgment of character. The replacement is Rio Ferdinand. The big Manchester United defender seems like an amicable individual and has put his weight behind noteworthy charitable causes. But still, this is a football player who missed Euro 2004 because he was serving an eight-month suspension for missing a drugs test. This is a man whose most concentrated efforts to England’s enduring obsession with bringing the World Cup trophy home was confined to his “Punk’d” inspired television show, Rio’s World Cup wind-ups.

These are not hanging offences but still, it hardly invites the conclusion that Ferdinand is cut from the same cloth as Bobby Moore.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to sit down with Gordon Banks, the England goalkeeper for their fabled summer of 1966. He was an impressive man: courteous, smart, incredibly humble. Conversation turned to the difference between Sheffield as it is today and when he grew up there. The coal clouds are gone, of course. But so too, he said, is the sense of community and spirit he recognised.

Banks went on a long, quiet, angry denunciation of the deteriorating state of England’s education system and the moral bankruptcy among young people in a city he was struggling to recognise as his own.

And this was no hankering after the old days. Banks was saying that something has gone wrong in England in the decades since they last won the World Cup. Anyone who has ever watched any of Shane Meadow’s bleak testimonies to life in regional England can see that.

This week, Portsmouth teeter on the brink and England’s World Cup hopes seem gripped in a melodramatic farce. Through all this, Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney continues to have a season for all seasons, quietly going about the business of scoring goals week in and week out.

Rooney has gone along with the obligatory Hello! photo shoots and is occasionally seen at red carpet events but he has done little to disguise his indifference to that whole charade. Here is an English football player with virtually no controversies, who wears his heart on his sleeve when he plays, who speaks modestly and well and who seems to have an abundance of the traditional qualities Capello has tried to foist on his band of scatter-brained young millionaires. Plus, Rooney is the best football player England has produced in a long time, recently drawing comparison to Pele from Eamon Dunphy and John Giles, veterans who do not easily shower modern English football players with garlands.

If England can claim glory in South Africa this summer – and that is hard to imagine that this week – surely Rooney should be the first man to join Bobby Moore on that particular pedestal.

One thing’s for sure: that would be the closest we will ever come to seeing an Irish man lifting the World Cup.