Frank Lampard seems certain to play in England’s forthcoming two World Cup qualifying matches, something which may not unduly worry the Andorrans and still less the Croats. Lampard’s place seems assured because his national nemesis, Steven Gerrard, is to have a groin operation which his club manager, Rafa Benitez, argues will rule him out for a highly convenient 10-15 days.

There are some England fans, myself among them, who would prefer Gerrard to play even if he was under general anaesthetic with half his groin hanging out than watch Frankie lumbering up the pitch devoid of purpose. We’d probably take Gerrard with his right leg sawn off, to be honest, but this, apparently, is not an option. Benitez, meanwhile, has argued that there was no alternative than to send Gerrard to the sawbones at this precise moment in time; the player was apparently in acute discomfort. It seems he wasn’t in acute discomfort a couple of weeks ago. I wonder if he will not be in discomfort in two weeks when Liverpool face Manchester United in the league. It all sounds a little bit like the sort of reasoning I employ to get out of a visit to the mother-in-law and this indeed seems to be the way it was viewed by the England coach, Fabio Capello. According to Benitez, he has “buried the hatchet” with Capello. Indeed. Midway down the man’s spine, probably.

Owen Hargreaves will not be fit to face Andorra and Croatia, either. I have to say I find this a bit of a mixed blessing. I would take Hargreaves over Lampard, but then I would take Millwall’s midfield dynamo Alan Dunne over Frankie – partly out of an unreasonable antipathy to the chap, but partly also on the evidence of his England performances over the past three years. If England feel insecure going into a match against Croatia because Hargreaves isn’t fit, then we really are in trouble. Hargreaves is a useful scampering monkey to have hanging about in front of the back four, but he is not the man to orchestrate a victory or to turn a match on its head.

The salient point, however, is that once again the club manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, effectively ruled out his player’s availability for England, even before Hargreaves supposedly did so himself. Sir Alex has form, of course. It is rare for an England match to take place without the Scot blithely informing the England manager that the only Manchester United player fit enough to take part is Wes Brown. Ferguson is nothing if not consistent. Still, an already “angry” Capello was now said to be “fuming”.

This is all familiar territory: the interminable battle between club and country. There always was some low-lev-el griping from the club bosses when a key player was called up for a meaningless international friendly. The club managers very much wish their players to be recognised as international-standard players with an England call-up – because it increases their value, even in the case of Seth Johnson – but they don’t really want them to actually play. The tension between the two sides has increased exponentially over the past 10 years and the balance is now firmly in favour of the clubs.

It is easy to see why. First, the Premier League clubs have more financial clout – and more, financially, to lose – than was ever the case before. The second and related fact is that the players now know upon which side their bread is buttered and even the most cretinous of them can distinguish between the competing rewards on offer: a salary which affords them a minimum of double the national average yearly wage every week versus a strange tasselled cap and some loose change. Third, the Premier League clubs are extremely successful, whereas England are utterly useless and have been for a considerable period of time.

So for the fans and players of the Big Four, the Champions League has to an extent taken over from international football as a form of breast-beating and bravado and the chance to compete against the best in Europe. Finally, the almost complete absence of Englishmen managing top Premier League clubs is a factor. I would not dream of overstating the influence of patriotism, not when matched against much deeper and more resonant factors, such as consuming financial greed, for example. None-the-less, it must be at least slightly easier for Sir Alex and Rafa and Arsène Wenger to dampen down the trumpets of English patriotic duty than it would have been for, say, Sir Bobby Robson (or even Kevin Keegan, come to that). In Sir Alex’s case the dampening down seems to be done with a certain amount of glee.

None of this is likely to change, in the medium term, without a bit of prodding from the Football Association but even there, the tide seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with the decision to compensate clubs for players injured while on international duty. Every way you look at it, the idea that playing for your country is a crowning achievement to a playing career is a notion that has receded almost beyond sight.

Usual suspects take position

August is usually written off by football commentators as a month of no consequence, a time of gently lengthening shadows across the pitch and players who are still taking antibiotics for that nasty infection they picked up in Gran Canaria, or who haven’t quite decided what club they’re going to play for this year. The results, we are frequently told, are not indicative. Hull City’s supporters will be warned, chidingly: “Look at the table in November, gentlemen, if you wish to see how things will be.”

Manchester United and Arsenal’s supporters may well be saying the very same things to one another. It is true that at the corresponding stage of last season, the eventual champions Manchester United were adrift somewhere in mid table, their city rivals occupying a giddyingly unfamiliar spot in the top four. But that just happens to be the exception that proves the rule. Because by and large, August is a fairly definitive month. The Premier League table – and the league tables below – will all look very similar in May to the way they look this afternoon and this has been true for as long as I have been watching football.

The general rule is that one team in the top five or six in August will not be there the following spring (last season it was Manchester City – maybe this year it will be Hull City) and down at the bottom, one team in the bottom four in August will manage to get themselves out of trouble come May (my guess, this time around, is that it will be Spurs).

In the corresponding weekend last season, two of the three relegation places had been neatly sorted out and the third team to go down, Birmingham City, were hovering just outside the bottom three (as they did for most of the season, in fact). Meanwhile, at the top, three of the four Champions League spots were already in place. Take a look at the Championship table, too – Birmingham to win the league, Barnsley and Burnley to go down? You would not bet against it.

Desperate times

Is the president of Uefa, Michel Platini, anti-English – in other words, a racist?

The accusation has been levelled at him in the English press following his criticism of the likes of Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool for buying success on unsustainably borrowed money.

For his part, Platini has responded by saying: ‘I am not anti-English. Napoleon was anti-English, not me.’

As a bone-headed little-Englander of the most appalling kind, I can usually be expected to find an anti-English bias in a handful of dust; but I can’t see it in Platini. You would have to accept, firstly, that Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool are English in anything other than name for the thesis to hold water. Samuel Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel – but that was in 1775.

Today it is perhaps more the case that howling ‘Racist!’ is the last refuge of somebody whose rational arguments simply do not add up.