The World Cup is over, Spain were victorious and they are the World Champions. At the end of the day whilst watching it from my humble abode here in the UK it is in my opinion that Spain were indeed worthy winners, although it was generally a disappointing tournament all-round in terms of the quality of the football played, and the embarrassment and humiliation the England players and management team bestowed upon our nation!
This article is part one of several to come celebrating those undeserved 'Sporting Champions' - those teams and/or individuals that were actually top of their field, yet were still pretty rubbish.
For this reason I shall call them 'Sport's Greatest Ever Pretenders,' starting with:
Blackburn Rovers - Premiership Champions 1995.
How did a team based around the workmanlike talents of Tim Sherwood and Jeff Kenna become champions of England?
Stick nine men behind the ball, hoof it up to Alan Shearer and hope he's not too busy flapping his pointy elbows into some poor old defender's eye socket, and in the interim point in time he whacks the ball into the back of the onion bag. That is how!
Ole, ole ole!.............free-flowing, aesthetically pleasing, champagne football!
That season Manchester United had been handicapped by the loss of the mercurial Eric 'the karate kid' Cantona, following a now well documented altercation with a Crystal Palace fan at Selhurst Park one January evening in 1995.
Without the suspended Frenchman it immediately became advantage Rovers, but they still failed to claim their prize with any assumed authority. They stumbled over the finishing line, losing three of their final five games, the last of which gave Manchester United the chance to snatch the title with the very last kick of the season, if they could win at West Ham. Luckily for Rovers, that final kick fell to United's Achilles heel, Andy Cole's club foot - and Kenny Dalglish's men topped the table by a single point.
They danced and they sang without a hint of ignominy, as this small Lancashire club lifted the Premier League trophy, just four years after the arrival and the aid of the late Jack Walker's dynasty and his millions.
Such end-of-season shamelessness would never be seen again............that was until Chelsea
insisted that it 'wasn't all about Roman's f***ing money,' when in June 2003 Ken Bates sold Chelski to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich for £140 million, completing what was then the biggest-ever sale of an English football club. He subsequently spent over £100 million on new players, as they went onto become the fifth English team to win (buy) back-to-back league championships since the Second World War in 2004/05 and 2005/06.
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