The boy Andros, doing it for the (England) shirt
Andros Townsend, former loan flop at Leeds and current first-team pariah and occasional sub at Tottenham Hotspur, scored a fine goal for England last night in Italy, bringing him bobbing briefly to the surface of the public consciousness from which he sank out of view some time back. Showing a characteristically warped sense of priorities, one of Townsend’s first moves after he emerged from the England shower/bath/jacuzzi/pampered poodle parlour – was to engage in a bit of social media one-upmanship, tweeting former England star and fellow fickoe Paul Merson to say “Not bad for a player that should be ‘nowhere near the squad’ ay?” Stinging repartee and worldie bantz, we would probably concede.
The thing is, young Mr Townsend really needs to concentrate on establishing himself in a first team somewhere, rather than making occasional cameo appearances in the Three Lions shirt, scoring the odd blinder and then promptly disappearing again. There’s a disagreeable odour about Andros, the oddly pungent stench of “attitude problem”. Talent he surely has in abundance; his approach to establishing himself as an indispensable part of a team is more open to doubt. The talent will serve to get him the odd spectacular goal in an international friendly; it is not on its own enough to make him a vital cog in a league machine. The conclusion we might reluctantly be forced to draw is that Merse – for once in a very long while – might actually have a point.
Perhaps a change of scene might benefit the boy Townsend. He’s been to Elland Road before and failed – would he have the character to try again? Could he bury that treacherous pride, buckle down and try to earn a berth for himself at a lower level, but somewhere subject to notoriously harsh pressures? Townsend wasted his time at Elland Road, seeming a dilettante type of player; one who flatters to deceive and lacks the bottle to cut it when the chips are down. When the going got tough, Andros shipped out, to the less demanding environment of Birmingham City, there to sulk and send petulant tweets to scornful Whites fans.
Then there was a brief golden period at Spurs, some sort of momentary redemption epoch when everything came easy to him – a situation you suspect Andros prefers, to actually having to graft and battle. And then he was suddenly in the England fold, and the sky was, it seemed, the limit. But his star fell as swiftly as it had risen; he has been superseded at Spurs by talents at least equal to his own and attitudes far superior – take a bow, Harry Kane. He’s still somehow in the Three Lions arena, but his hold on that status must be tenuous at best.
Could Townsend actually still cut it at Leeds – where wingers are required for the run-in, players to bring out the best of the youthful talent that is blossoming at Elland Road? Leeds United is, after all, a club of comparatively recent Champion pedigree, something that Spurs have to look back 54 years to recall. So, self-regarding Andros wouldn’t exactly be slumming it – and at the moment, he’d have a fighting chance of actually forcing his way into a developing United team.
It’s an intriguing thought. Well, I think it is. Perhaps I just want to see the lad humiliated again, after his unforgivably casual attitude when he had the chance and that iconic United shirt before. But, from Townsend’s point of view – if he really wanted to shove Paul Merson’s opinion back down his throat – then a stint somewhere like Leeds and a bit of consistency would do a lot more to that end than one sweetly-struck shot against what was a second-string Italian team.
As the Merse himself might say – “Fink abaht it, Andros – fink abaht it.”
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