Prima donna

Critics of football talk about how ridiculous it is for twenty-two grown men to chase around after an inflated pig’s bladder trying to kick it between some wooden posts. As much as I love the sport, it is hard to argue. It is even more difficult to claim that football is serious when it is turned into a sensationalist circus as it was on Saturday at Stamford Bridge.

The world – or at least the part of it with nothing better to do and even less to think about – waited with bated breath to see whether Wayne Bridge and John Terry would shake hands. This moment was the final act to push modern football – in England at least – over the edge of mediocrity and into the pit of TV reality.

(And by the way, those people who have lauded Bridge's maturity and his ability to get over it are wrong - if that had been the case he would simply have shaken hands with the man and got on with it. Instead he chose to stare him out, testosterone-fuelled alpha male challenge, showing that he is still disgusted that someone could do the dirty on anyone as important as a Premier League footballer.)

Worse than “the handshake (or lack of)” was Bridge’s decision not to play for England. This over-paid, arrogant, preening, self-centred prima donna has decided that his personal problems are sufficient excuse to abandon the national team, in a World Cup year to boot. These are not personal problems of the magnitude of those currently suffered by Edwin van der Sar, for example, or Carlos Tévez, rather a product of behaving as if he was proud to belong to England’s new underclass.

Playing for England should be an unpaid privilege, an honour with no more payment than the sheer pride of being asked to wear the shirt. The team, the badge and the country should always be above the players, it should be much more than the sum of its human parts, and any player who believes himself to be more important than the national team should never be invited to play for his country again.

Bridge is an embarrassment to the game, but he is simply another person showing the symptoms of the malaise that is poisoning the English game. So much so, in fact, that it is surprising that he should reject the opportunity to join the England camp – he would be well at home in the company of the prima donnas and hooligans who currently play for England.