WAGs shouldn’t go to Russia, warns Pearce
STUART PEARCE, the former England player with the most knowledge of WAGs at World Cups, has warned manager Gareth Southgate not to allow them near his squad in Russia.
England look likely to be staying outside St Petersburg, which will be a very popular and accessible venue for the players’ friends and families to establish a base.
And the WAGs will be welcome in the camp at certain times, with Southgate saying after qualification was sealed on Thursday: ‘I want their families to be able to come in at the right moments.’
But former England u21 boss Pearce had been well informed by a primary source before he said on talk SPORT this week that Southgate should keep the WAGs well away from the team environment or risk players losing focus.
Pearce recalled how some players during the 2006 World Cup had even been phoned by their wives and told to come to their hotel so they could have a break from looking after the children.
Pearce’s partner Carol Day is a former FA teams’ administrator who had the unenviable task of looking after the WAGs in 2006, when their antics in Baden-Baden became a media circus that overshadowed the team’s performances.
The stories from those near four weeks in the Brenners Park Hotel in company with Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole (right), Abbey Clancy, Carly Zucker, Coleen Rooney, Elen Rivas, Neville Neville and the Carragher clan are part of football folklore. Day, who seemingly accompanies Pearce everywhere on his football travels, would know about all of them — and more besides.
The fall-out from Baden-Baden saw the FA have nothing to do with the WAGs at subsequent tournaments at which they were left to make their own arrangements.
THE appointment of highly rated Twickenham insider Stephen Brown, the former chief of the England 2015 Rugby World Cup organisers, as RFU chief executive looked straightforward. But it certainly got less complicated after British Olympic Association chief Bill Sweeney decided to drop out because of unfinished business at the BOA. IT IS a prominent part of the job advert to replace Mark Sampson as England women’s senior head coach that ‘successful candidates would need to be willing to undertake background screening as part of the recruitment process’.
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