#AgainstModernFootball - preliminary squads

It all starts with the announcement of the squads. Before the official songs are released, before the adverts for cut-price televisions and lager are run, before the bunting is tied to a single lamppost, a major tournament summer starts with the announcement of the squads that will be travelling there. Roy Hodgson announced which players will be going to Euro 2016 with England last week. Except he didn’t really.

Instead Hodgson announced a 26-man preliminary squad, as is the done thing now. Only 23 will make the trip to the European Championships, with three eventually left at home. England, and essentially every other national team in international football, have named preliminary squads prior to every major tournament since 1998. It has become a characteristic of modern football, but why? What do preliminary squads actually achieve?

Did Hodgson not have enough time since the last tournament - the World Cup two years ago - to scout players for his squad? England have played no fewer than 19 games since they drew against Costa Rica in Belo Horizonte - was that not ample opportunity for the national team manager to test the suitability of fringe players? What will difference will two more weeks really make?

It’s as if Hodgson has invited 26 players to the airport departure lounge, but only 23 will be handed tickets for a seat on the plane. In fact, The FA could cut costs considerably by holding their pre-tournament training camp in the airport terminal rather than at St George’s Park. They could do drills in and out of the queues for the check-in desks, juggling the ball over aisles of sweets in WH Smith.

At least England will cut three players from their squad before making their way to France. Belgium named a preliminary squad of 24 players to be cut down to 23. Just one player will miss out on the flight to Paris, like Macauley Culkin at Christmas. Even more bizarrely, they also named six standby options. Marc Wilmots has never been one for public relations, but even by his standards such a process just to cut a single player is cold. Ice cold.

National team coaches should simply name their 23 man squads for the tournament and save everyone the indignity of the elimination process. Will such attention and stress really help the development of Marcus Rashford as a teenage prospect should he be cut? It all seems rather unnecessary and counter-productive.

It’s little wonder Simon Cowell hasn’t franchised the whole thing with a live primetime TV show presented by Ant and Dec, complete with ITV 2 spinoff fronted by Olly Murs and Caroline Flack. It would certainly get better ratings than the X Factor or whichever reality TV show features a dancing dog at the moment. They could have Ian Wright, Lee Dixon and Glenn Hoddle as judges.

Whichever three players get cut from Hodgson’s preliminary squad, perhaps they’ll meet up to watch England’s Euro 2016 games together this summer. Fabian Delph will grab the barbecue food, Andros Townsend will pick up a crate of Carling from Morrisons with Rashford on the blue WKDs (he is only 18 years old, after all).

It wasn’t always this way. For Euro 96 England manager Terry Venables simply named a 22-man squad for the tournament and took 22 men to the tournaments. Something changed between then and the 1998 World Cup, though, with Hoddle initially naming a provisional squad of 30 players. Paul Gascoigne famously missed out on the final squad, leaving the team’s training camp in disgust, never playing for England again.

Preliminary squads are more bother than they are worth. There’s very little to be truly gained from them, with the already lengthy process of picking a squad only stretched further for the sake of pedantry. Major tournaments are already a stressful enough time for players without the added elimination contest before boarding the plane. If national team coaches are charged with ensuring a relaxing and tranquil environment to prepare their players for the rigours of a European Championships or World Cup then this is an altogether puzzling approach.

Perhaps it’s nothing more than a generous gift to journalists, providing them with something to write and speculate about in that awkward no man’s land between the end of the domestic season and the start of the summer tournaments. Because with Louis Van Gaal’s firing at Manchester United, Jose Mourinho’s impending hiring and the opening of the transfer market there is so little to write about at the moment.

Other than that it’s difficult to see any real value in the process of elimination. For someone like Rashford the experience might be of some worth, but the likely fate of his cutting from the squad is something a player of his age could certainly do without. If this was the X Factor not even Murs and Flack’s banter could pick up the unlucky contestant.