This will be final blog on MySpace, I'm afraid. A few of you may know that there's been some fairly dramatic changes in life recently!

From July 16, I'll be the UK Correspondent for The Singapore New Paper and simultaneously writing a football book for A&C Black which will be published next summer.

I can't wait to get started with next season, but all the extra work means that keeping a blog will be nigh on impossible.

I'm am, to coin a phrase, absolutely over the moon about how things have turned out and I'm sure I will bump into all of you again at some point.

I'm still logged in on the less labour intensive FaceBook, so feel free to drop by and add me. It makes me feel warm and bubbly inside.

All the best,

Iain

Everyone loves Peter

What is it about Peter Crouch? He's freakishly tall, he has the kind of face that could wilt flowers from a distance of 20 yards and yet, for some reason, everyone loves him. Have a look around the pub the next time he scores on television. Assuming they're not supporting the other team, everyone breaks out into beaming, wide smiles. Friends turn to each other and laugh. The world, just for a moment, becomes a beautiful place.

Even cynical people like me, when they explain that they don't think he warrants an England starting place, say things like, "Don't get me wrong, I love Peter Crouch, but…"

That never happened when I tried to explain that James Beattie wasn't international class.

I'd always want him in a squad, if nothing else than for the fact that he terrifies defenders by looming over them at set-pieces. You might also have heard that, "he's got a great touch, for a big man." Seriously, if anyone else corners me in a pub and, in a voice that suggests they're letting me in on the secret eleventh commandment, tells me that he's got a good touch for a big man, I can't be held responsible for my reactions.

But a world class footballer? Surely not. So why the infatuation?

Two years ago, Graham Taylor was quizzed on the Peter Crouch phenomenon when the cloud-bothering striker was on an unprecedented goalscoring run at Southampton. The former England manager said that if he'd have had a daughter available, he'd have offered her to Crouch. A nicer man, Taylor mused, you will not meet inside or outside of football.

When the tabloids gleefully printed murky stories about his new girlfriend, everyone's reaction was the same. "Oh…poor Peter!" we wailed. "Bless him, he'll be heartbroken."

I think it's because everyone sees a little bit of themselves in Peter Crouch. Stop tittering at the back!

It's true. When you watch Crouch swinging a leg at a loose ball with all the grace and poise of a collapsing Jenga tower, your heart glows. It's like Crouch is the emissary of everyone who's ever been told that they weren't good enough to play football. He's out there, representing all the misfits and failures. He's flying our flag.

He's not a big-time Charlie, he's a nice guy who has worked his way into a wonderful position. Just like anyone who has ever landed their dream job and then spent the first few months wondering when someone's going to find them out and take it away, he's squeezing everything he can out of it now.

Or am I wrong, is he actually just a rubbish player with a nice smile?

Iain Macintosh  - Column 38

Saturday was strange. Strange because, after a season of struggling to survive in the Championship, my beloved Southend decided that, actually, they'd rather play in League One next season after all. Strange because while they were capitulating so pathetically at Hull, I was perched in the Director's Box at Upton Park. But strangest of all because that inhospitable corner of East London that I had crept into was, on the 25^th anniversary of the Falklands War, falling head over heels in love with an Argentine.

Carlos Tevez is not the kind of chap who strikes you as instantly loveable. Built like a hairy breezeblock and covered in scar tissue, he has the kind of face that only a very lonely person could love. But what he lacks in looks, as the old saying goes, he more than makes up for on the pitch.

Tevez is, of course, prodigiously skillful, but the reason for all of the heart fluttering in the East End lies in his phenomenal work-rate. From the first whistle to the standing ovation that marked his substitution, Tevez charged about the pitch like an eager youth player trying to earn a contract.

The newspapers on Sunday suggested that the fortune that's always hiding from West Ham finally made an appearance this weekend. Bobbins. West Ham won because they worked and harried a lacklustre Middlesbrough side for 90 minutes. When the Teessiders made mistakes, it was because they had Tevez or Zamora or, and this one will shock you, a resurgent Nigel Reo-Coker, snapping at their heels.

Why couldn't they do this earlier in the season? There are so many teams clogging up the Premiership with oppressive 4-5-1 formations, strangling games in a desperate bid for one solitary point. Why can't they get relegated instead? When the Irons are in full flow, their football is whole-hearted and compelling. Sadly, their buccaneering style only serves to highlight just how phenomenally lethargic they've been for the past eight months.

But enough of that and back to our stout South American friend. Malco-ordinated mortals like myself will always fall at the feet of individuals who match innate talent with maximum effort. Carlos Tevez plays like a man desperate to squeeze as much out of his career as he can.

Contrast that with the performance of the only man who could claim to match Tevez in terms of innate talent, Mark Viduka. The lumpy Australian was an empty shirt on Saturday, as he has been so often this season. Content to waddle about in the final third, Viduka put as much effort into retrieving the ball as fat, bullied children do into getting their stolen dinner money back.

Middlesbrough fans may claim that he's the only talented player at The Riverside, and that may be so, but I'd want a few more goals for my money. He's hit the back of the net just seven times in the Premiership this season. There's no doubting his talent, but as Leeds United found out to their extreme cost, you need more than just a superior swagger when you're at the wrong end of the table.

West Ham will almost certainly go down this season. Their revival has come far too late in the day and when their demise is assured, it seems certain that the big earners like Carlos Tevez will leave. But with performances like last weekend's, he'll live for ever in the hearts of West Ham fans.

Will Mark Viduka leave the same legacy at The Riverside? Of course he won't. The only thing he will leave is a trail is a serious deficit in the food revenues of the Northeast.  At the end of this month, they'll both open a pay-packet with a phenomenal amount of noughts on it. I think we all know who deserves it most.

Iain Macintosh Column 37

One thing struck me when I watched England last Saturday. Unconsciousness.

It was a total waste of 90 minutes of my life and I'll never, ever get that time back. When I'm flat out on my death bed, gathering my family around me and waiting for the final grains of sand to slip through the egg-timer of my life, I'll remember that game and devote my last words to swearing at Steve McClaren.

Still, it's not all bad. Somewhere in my blurry memories of listless millionaires playing out of position, I recall one of the British commentators inadvertently hitting upon the solution to all of our problems.

It appears that the Israeli wonder kid Ben Sahar, is going to have to put his promising Chelsea career on hold and return to his home country for a three year spell of National Service. Three years of chopping potatoes and polishing rifles in Spartan conditions while his contemporaries at Stamford Bridge hurl tens of thousands of pounds at gaudy jewellery and topless models. Hmmm…

Now, we haven't had National Service in the UK since 1960 and ever since it was abolished, the British tabloids have responded to anything from the appearance of The Beatles to a rise in street-crime, by unsuccessfully clamouring for its return.

Perhaps I can suggest a middle-ground. Maybe we can just bring it in for footballers? That'll teach them to loaf around the pitch wasting everyone's time. Perhaps the FA should consider some kind of Pulau Tekong for Premiership players? I'm sure we can find a suitable island somewhere.

There's a pattern emerging with this generation of England players and it owes an awful lot to the meaningless 'soundbite' politics of Tony Blair. First they appear in front of a press conference pledging their total effort and claiming to know exactly how important the game is. Then, after 90 minutes of empty-headed meandering, they pop up again in front of the cameras humbly taking full responsibility for their failure, as if that makes it all better.

I don't want to hear soundbites, I want to see effort. And if the effort isn't there, then I want to see punishment!

I had the pleasure of watching Scotland beat Georgia before the England game and they were magnificent. Every time they got the ball they looked to move forward. They swept across the pitch with wave after wave of simple, but effective passing. Then, with minutes to go, they clattered in the winner that their efforts full warranted.

There's not a single Scottish footballer who would get into the England squad right now. They are, almost to a man, second flight footballers. But, by God, they do at least care about what they're doing.

A year in National Service at the beginning of their glittering careers might just be what the English players need to give them some perspective. I'm not asking for much, just a short period of basic training and then they can go off and earn their riches.

It wouldn't be all bad. Wayne Rooney would absolutely love it, wouldn't he? Finally he'd have a legitimate reason to leave the football behind and concentrate on damaging people. I very much doubt that he'd actually want to return to the Premiership. He'd be tooled up and ready for deployment to Iraq in no time.

John Terry is another who you suspect would get a little too involved. He's the kind of recruit who would be able to rebuild his rifle blindfolded, but would flip out on an orienteering exercise and wind up living in a cave eating bats.

You just know that Michael Owen and Jonathan Woodgate would somehow manage to injure themselves on the first day. Michael Owen would twist his knee after taking an early lead on the assault course and Woodgate would trip over his rifle on parade and puncture a lung on his bayonet.

Frank Lampard is bound to get caught smuggling donuts in from the Mess Camp. He's got a naughty face, that boy.

I know it seems crazy to send our superstars to Boot Camp at a time like this, but seriously, there are players in the Championship who could easily match the performance dolled out by those overpaid charlatans on Saturday night.

And, hey, even if it doesn't work, at least it'll go some way to appeasing our wrath when Second Choice Steve's listless squad fail to make it to the 2008 European Championships.

Get down and give me 20, Lampard!

There can't be much in life that's worse than sitting through an England performance these days. Well, war maybe. And, you know, famine… that's pretty nasty. But outside of the jurisdiction of those four horsemen, watching Steve McClaren's England is right up there.

So, come on. Let's have a bit of group therapy. We're all hurting, but there's no point getting angry about it now. There's no way we can ever get those wasted 90 minutes back and we're just going to have to accept it.

But it's been more soul-destroying than this, hasn't it? Yes, Second Choice Steve just gathered some of the finest footballers in Europe and led them to a toothless 0-0 with Israel, but I've seen a lot worse.

What about the Graham Taylor era, eh? That was pretty ropey. Huge squads filled with people like David White and the ancient Gordon Cowans who probably had less of a claim on an international cap than Phil bloody Neville. Tony Daley in and Chris Waddle out. Fifteen years on and I still can't get my head around that one.

Come on now, everyone join hands and try to remember the 2-0 defeat to USA in Boston, 1993. Remember Alexi Lalas, the ginger Catweasel, putting the second goal past the hapless Chris Woods? See! That was much worse than Saturday!

Northern Ireland beat us in the World Cup qualifiers in 2005 and we were absolutely awful. At least Israel didn't score, huh? Huh? Come on!

And what about that defeat at Upton Park a few years ago? A raft of half-time Svenstitutions and we somehow managed to lose to Australia at football. That really hurt. They can have the rugby, no-one really cares about that. They can even have The Ashes, it's their turn after all. But, for God's sake, football was ours!

So come on, chaps and chapesses, I want to know your worst experience watching England. Maybe if we share our pain, we can put the Israel game behind us. We can remind each other that a spineless England performance is all part of life's rich tapestry.

And if all else fails, even if you can't come on here and tell us all about a worse England display than that misbegotten shambles from Saturday night, you can still look on the bright side - even Steve McClaren can't lose to Andorra.

Seriously, he can't, can he?

Post your responses on http://www.4sportsake.com/

Iain Macintosh Column 36

There was once a shopkeeper who ran three small grocery stores scattered across my hometown. In these heady days of 1980s England, when most shops were shut outside of peak hours, he cleaned up by staying open all the time. He loved those shops and took a real hands-on role, appearing behind the counter and sometimes out the front, washing the windows. I'd never seen anyone so happy.

Sadly, the supermarkets soon fought back and started opening all the time as well. The shopkeeper's empire was fatally compromised and I'm told that he was eventually picked up by the police with a can of petrol in his hand, trying to set fire to his own shops for the insurance money.

This is how it feels to be an England supporter right now. Everything's gone horribly wrong and the only way out seems to be through self-destruction. We've had some happy times wearing Three Lions on our shirts, but it seems like an awfully long time ago. With a difficult fixture in Tel Aviv on the horizon, many of us are poised, can of petrol and box of matches in hand, hoping that Israel win and that the resulting flames consume this shambles of a team and burn it to the ground.

It's important to remember that Steve McClaren was nobody's first choice as England manager. The Football Association wanted former Brazilian manager Phil Scolari. The newspapers were torn between Stuart Pearce, Alan Curbishley and Sam Allardyce. Even McClaren himself probably thought someone else could do a better job than him.

The Sven Goran Eriksson era started so brightly, but ended with spineless performances from players who had no idea where they were supposed to be playing. The stubborn Swede had stuck to 4-4-2 for his entire career before finally buckling under media pressure. Faced with constant accusations that he had no 'Plan B', Eriksson cracked and used Plans C through to T, seemingly at random. It was clueless football.

What England needed was a powerful figure to come in and sweep out the remnants of the old era. A proven winner who could put a structure for success in place. A leader to make the people believe again.

What we got was Steve McClaren. A man who looks like a bus driver and whose four years of heavy spending at Middlesbrough brought in just one League Cup and a succession of mediocre mid-table finishes.

I hate criticising England managers. They have the most difficult and thankless task in football. England fans think they have a divine right to success, despite years of chronic underachievement. It's like living in an entire nation of Tottenham supporters.

I wanted to believe in McClaren. The nice, compassionate part of my head tried to convince me that continuity was a good thing. Sadly continuity only works when you're continuing something good and England's 2006 World Cup campaign was a long, long way from being good.

But the worst thing is that it's becoming impossible to figure out what Steve McClaren is actually trying to achieve.

McClaren seems to think that crowbarring all of your best players into the starting line-up, regardless of their natural position, is a winning formula. If that was the case, Real Madrid would have been unbeatable for the last four years.

McClaren ignores promising young left-backs like Leighton Baines and Steve Warnock and instead picks right-footed Phil Neville to play there. That doesn't make sense on any level.

McClaren's refusal to choose between Gerrard and Lampard has led to the odd sight of the Chelsea man loping about ineffectually on the left-wing, or the equally baffling placement of Gerrard out on the right, marooned from the bulk of the play.

Why doesn't he just choose one of them, bench the other and actually build a balanced team; a team with two wingers, an attacking midfielder and a defensive midfielder?

A couple of years ago, an away tie against a team like Israel would be a routine win. Now it's a tough fixture!

There are many of us now, I'm afraid to say, with that can of petrol poised. Perhaps, we try to tell ourselves, perhaps if Israel win on Saturday then McClaren will go. Perhaps it will be like waking up from a vivid nightmare and we'll just be able to shake the memory of this out of our heads. Perhaps the fire will take away the pain and we can start all over again.

Iain Macintosh Column 35

Most English fans share the same memory of their first ever visit to a football ground. They'll recall the heady smell of the onions at the hotdog stands and the incoherent shouts of the programme sellers. They'll remember the throbbing mass of fans shuffling towards the turnstiles and the smell of booze and cigarette smoke in the air. But most of all, they'll remember the simply astonishing amount of swearing they heard that day.

For your average nine-year old boy, just discovering swearwords but still forbidden to execute them, this is the kind of experience that would eclipse a free trip to Disneyland. Hordes of red-faced, grown-ups howling the most imaginative of swearwords, mixing and matching their running order, combining them to find new, even more offensive expletives. Ah, they were magical days.

Swearing has always been integral to football ever since the old days when it genuinely was 'the people's game' and 'the people' were in a really bad mood. A football stadium was a sanctuary for people with a few things to get off their chest.

So it's surprising to see that Jose Mourinho's recent observations on a referee's family background have caused so much trouble, particularly as he was kind enough to shout these observations in a language that only four or five people in the stadium could understand.

I don't recall there being a tabloid outcry last week when Sam Allardyce, according to a lipreader in a British magazine, called the referee a, "plucking incompetent bat," or something similar. Sir Alex Ferguson has spent the last 20 years hinting that some referees may have disputed parentage and he's always managed to get away with it.

So why the outcry when Jose swears in a foreign language? Mike Riley, the referee in question, didn't even mention the incident in his report, but the British media went loopy over it. Is it alright to swear if you're English and therefore 'passionate', but not if you're a foreigner? It certainly seems that way.

There seems to be a growing swell of resentment building up in football as, one by one, people run out of patience with Jose Mourinho. It's a real shame because, as I've said throughout this season, there are so many good reasons to hate Chelsea and he isn't one of them.

Swearing isn't a particularly pleasant pastime especially if, like my father, you're at the match with an impressionable nine-year old boy. An old man in a pub once told me that swearing was the first sign of an exhausted mind. Naturally I told him to f*ck off, but looking back, perhaps he had a point! But in all seriousness, there's an awful lot worse going on in the game, isn't there?

If we're going to start purging the undesirable elements, let's start with the racism, shall we? Why have West Ham still not been punished for the sight of hundreds of their fans chant 'sieg heil' at Tottenham, a historically Jewish club, a fortnight ago?

Or perhaps we can crack down on the appalling time-wasting that's crept into the game of late. In their FA Cup clash with Plymouth last weekend, Watford started time-wasting after thirty minutes! When you pay a small fortune for a match ticket, you don't expect to spend half the game watching a goalkeeper place and replace the ball for goalkicks before pausing to pull his socks up in

slow motion. Time is money, Watford! Let's get on their case.

This latest Mourinho episode is nothing more than a desperate witch-hunt. Football is a passionate game and it needs passionate managers. If Jose Mourinho wasn't getting upset by Mike Riley then fans would be on his back wondering if he really cares anymore. He can't win either way.

Anyway, last Tuesday night, Southend scored an injury-time winner and I cheered so hard that I dribbled down my jacket. I feel terrible. Now that's socially unacceptable behaviour!

Iain Macintosh Column 33

Here in rain-soaked England only three things are certain in life; death, taxes and a perpetual debate about immigration and nationality. The knowledge that the media will still be attacking immigration policy long after the first of those certainties has claimed us is really quite depressing.

It's an odd quirk of this nook-shotten isle that, despite us all being immigrants anyway, anyone who can trace their ancestry back more than one generation feels obliged to hate all the newcomers. We're all obsessed with what constitutes 'Englishness' and what doesn't.

Skinheads sat knuckle-deep in Indian food argue that immigration is bringing nothing to the country. Indian shopkeepers in London sneer at Kosovan customers for being immigrants. Kosovans who have worked here for ten years hate the newly arrived Poles for not being as English as them.

So thank the Lord that this weekend we finally received a clear and definitive answer to the question, "What is it to be an Englishman?" Step forward, John Terry.

The colossal Chelsea defender was playing the lead in his own comic book adventures on Sunday afternoon. For starters, he shouldn't even have been on the pitch after he turned his ankle in midweek. I pity the poor physio who had to ask him if he'd consider sitting out a cup final.

Nevertheless, he played through the pain, leading his team against a spirited assault from Arsene Wenger's men. Then, like Horatio Nelson himself, he fell in battle with the end in sight. Terry hurled himself face-first after a loose ball and took a boot in the chops for his troubles. The force of Abou Diaby's kick was enough to injure the young Arsenal player's foot and it knocked John Terry unconscious while he was still in mid-air.

For a horrible five minutes, it looked like something very serious had happened. Too many footballers have died on the pitch in recent years for us not to recognise the panic in the eyes of players from both teams as Terry lay prone on the turf.

The England captain was stretchered off, clad in neck-brace and oxygen pack, and Chelsea went on to win, still not knowing the fate of their captain.

So it came as something of a surprise to hear that a few hours later, John Terry was back with his team-mates at a celebration for their eventual cup win. Is this man absolutely unkillable? Are Manchester United going to have to invest in silver bullets to win the title race? Diaby accidentally kicked him in the face so hard that he broke his foot in doing so and Terry was out celebrating in a nightclub on the same day!

Now that, my friends, is what it means to be English.

Contrast this with the behaviour of Wayne Bridge. In the dying moments of the game there were more fights breaking out on that pitch than you'd have found at the wedding reception of Romeo and Juliet. In the midst of the chaos, Bridge sneered at the equally odious Emmanuel Eboue and childishly threw the ball away from him. Eboue, being the gentleman pugilist that he is, slapped him on the back of the head when he wasn't looking.

Bridge, I'm afraid to report, actually had the temerity to look around for the officials before he crashed to the ground, rolling and howling in agony. He was down on the grass clutching his head and wailing for almost as long as it took the medical team to scoop up the genuinely injured John Terry. If Didier Drogba had done that, we'd still be hearing about it now.

Being English isn't a question of colour. It's about attitude. It's about hurling yourself into battles that can't possibly be won, it's about attempting to do the right thing and getting wiped out in the process. And, of course, it's about drinking a lot of beer afterwards. 

Hang your not-really-bruised head in shame, Wayne Bridge.