Come on England! We can't afford to lose this one, as we will have to endure smug Taffy bastards going on about it for the next fifty years, like the Jocks still do after a they scraped a flukey one-nil in 1967 against England reserves.
The funny thing is though, that England's overpaid and spoilt players' poor turnout against Austria had us virtually supporting the Austrians at the end just so the players would get the rollocking from the press that they deserved. This won't happen here because the "home internationals" have always been the most passionate and insanely partisan affairs. They had to stop them in the Eighties because there was simply too much trouble between rival groups of supporters, who were all too eager to dredge up centuries of conflicts going right back to Roman times. Up and down the UK, train carriages would be wrecked in a bizarre cocktail of random historical characters and battles taken out of context and confused with each other as well as with fictional elements, vandalism, fist-fighting and alcohol abuse.
The Welsh team are certainly capable of pulling off an upset, but they'll have to control the game and not allow England to play. If England are nervous and don't get a grip of the match early on then it will degenerate into the usual sort of tedious scrap you invariably get in home internationals, in which very few chances are created. It then only takes one deflection or scrambled corner from big fat ginger Sunday league forward, John Hartson to go in and we would be in real trouble. However, if England play well, then they should have no trouble coasting to a two or three nil victory.
Let's hope Michael Owen can still play. After all, his new club Real Madrid are really good at taking the world's best players and ruining them with a combination of too much pay, unrealistic weight of expectation, ridiculous squad rotation and an unfounded superiority complex leading to a suspicion of non-Spanish players depsite the fact that Spain's crap national side have never, ever got anywhere in international tournaments.