McClaren Reborn As Result Goes Against Goliath

For a day or two at least we are going to have to live with the frightening possibility that Steve McClaren actually knows what he is talking about. Oh how we sniggered when he faced the cameras after the Austria match on Friday and talked about fancying David to "get a result" against Goliath.

David has got a pretty good record on his home turf, said McClaren, flashing his media smile, while the poor blighter detailed to crucify - sorry, interview - him struggled to stifle his giggles, like one of Michael Palin's Roman centurions in that Monty Python film. What is more, Steve reminded the p.b., anything could happen in the Macedonia-Croatia match, because it was "a local derby". "Yeah right, Steve," chorused the armchair cynics at home - well, just me, actually, I could not persuade anyone to watch the match with me - "like Bulgaria-Monaco."

Not that I felt, even before Saturday's remarkable results, that sacking McClaren would achieve anything, other than adding to the gaiety of nations while we wait for the first eviction from I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. The manager seemed to me to be doing a half-decent job with England's overpaid, overpraised show ponies, which these days is the best we can hope for from anyone.

I was probably just feeling more than usually dyspeptic after the dismal, unnecessary match in Vienna, for which the BBC did not improve the mood by giving Mark Bright, a leading member of the "he'll be disappointed with that" school of punditry, the co-commentator gig. Brighty's defining moment came when Ashley Young's wild shot at goal actually missed the corner flag and went out for a throw-in on the far side, prompting the following forensic analysis: "He didn't quite get hold of it, did he?"

The commentator, Guy Mowbray, seemed more in tune with the mood of the nation when he said: "It's a game that is crying out for the final whistle." I cannot remember being less thrilled by a British triumph in Europe since Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson (ask your grandads, kids).

The problem is that McClaren, quite apart from the irrelevance in Austria, is simply not an easy man to warm to, and therefore to side with. Maybe it is the work he has had done on those pearly white teeth he insists on flashing at not entirely appropriate moments. He always seems to be shooting us a line. You can feel the insincerity. As the comedian Rob Heeney said on BBC Radio 5 Live's Fighting Talk on Saturday, Steve - and Sven before him - gives the impression of having taken the England job because it seemed like a good way to meet girls.

Well, the message coming from Yarm this morning is yah boo to all of us. Steve got it spot-on, although before we get too carried away it is worth recalling the old proverb - Croatian, as it happens - that "even the blind hen occasionally pecks a grain".

It is thanks to Israel, rather than any tactical genius of Steve's, that tickets for the Croatia match at Wembley, which for a time seemed about as dubious a purchase as front-row seats at an Amy Wine house gig, are now the hottest in town. I wonder if Israel's victory will pose a problem for the more unreconstructed "patriots" among the England fans whose idea of a good time is singing anti-IRA songs and booing foreign national anthems, and for whom the words "mazel tov", one assumes, would stick in the throat. Or will they give thanks to the government, whose turning of a blind eye to human rights abuses in the occupied territories seems to have paid dividends? It's a joke, Guardian readers, a joke.

My instinct after Israel's thrilling triumph was to go to the synagogue and give thanks, which would have given them something of a shock as they haven't seen me for 40 years. Even as a seriously lapsed Jew, however, I am always on the lookout for examples of anti-Semitism - built into our DNA, you see; me, Wine house, all of us - and thought I had spotted one in Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares when he said: "Thank God, no more sticky Jews." The word, it turns out, was jus, something the nightmare in question insisted on sloshing on all his laughable dishes.

This may not be the place to say it - although Ramsay is former Rangers player, so why not? - but Kitchen Nightmares seems to me to be genius, what television was invented for. It is about so much more than the food. Ramsay's attempts to get Elaine and Brian, the Hyacinth Bouquet-style Lancastrians running last week's pub, to unbend, said more about marriage, middle-age, life in Britain and all that than Alan Ayckbourn or Mike Leigh could in a dozen plays. And Gordon swears so beautifully, too. "It's like chewing a fucking golf ball" was his verdict on Brian's rack of lamb.

Ramsay will have been as devastated as the rest of us at Scotland's predictably unlucky defeat to Italy, the highlights of which were the mass singing of the Proclaimers' 500 Miles shortly before kick-off and the Sky presenter Jim White's attempts - Paxman-style - to winkle a prediction out of Andy Gray. In the end it was another disappointment for the Scots. I don't know - first the Krankies, now this.