Sack the fans.
Why not? Everyone else gets blamed.
The manager must go. The players are useless. The tactics are wrong. The board is incompetent. The left-back is apparently a national disgrace because he misplaced a pass under pressure.
Yet the fans remain oddly untouched.
This is especially worth remembering before England play Mexico. Because if England win, we will hear all about the supporters. The noise. The passion. The shirt. The anthem. The “12th man”.
Fine. But that cuts both ways.
You cannot be the 12th man when the team wins and an innocent paying customer when it loses.
A crowd can lift a team. It can also smother one. It can turn pressure into energy, or pressure into panic. Groaning after 10 minutes, booing mistakes, abusing players online, demanding instant perfection from human beings trying to play knockout football - none of that is neutral.
It affects the atmosphere. It affects confidence. It affects decisions. It becomes part of the match. So by all means criticise the manager. Question the selection. Moan about the substitutions. That is half the fun, and without it football would be 22 men running about while sober people make spreadsheets.
But if supporters want credit for inspiring victory, they should not vanish from the accounts when things go wrong. If England are poor against Mexico, perhaps the first question should not be, “Who do we sack?” Perhaps it should be:
How well did the 12th man play?
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