O’Neill blasts friendly farce

Villa boss Martin O’Neill has hit out at the arranging of ‘meaningless’ international friendlies.

O’Neill has seven players involved in games for their countries over the next few days, despite the Premier League season ending almost three weeks ago.

Gareth Barry, Ashley Young and Gabriel Agbonlahor have linked up with England, while Wilfred Bouma (Holland), Martin Laursen (Denmark), John Carew (Norway) and Moustapha Salifou (Togo) are also involved in internationals.

Only Bouma is involved in Euro 2008, but Villa players are having to report back earlier for pre-season training because they are in the Intertoto Cup.

“Some of the players were saying that the annoyance is not so much in coming back a day or two earlier, it’s actually having meaningless friendly games almost three weeks after the season’s over,” fumed O’Neill.

“Players who really should be sitting on a beach by now are still having to think about friendly games that don’t mean anything.

“John Carew’s playing for Norway for instance and Norway haven’t qualified for the Euros. The same goes with the two England games.

“These are meaningless games that club managers can do without. You can end up picking up injuries and it’s always hard to take if players pick up injuries outside your jurisdiction.”

England play the USA at Wembley tomorrow and Trinidad and Tobago away on Sunday, Bouma and Laursen play each other on Thursday, while Carew is set to face Uruguay tomorrow, and Salifou has games against Libya and Zambia.

O’Neill cites Michael Owen’s stop-start time at Newcastle after he was injured playing for England as an example of how clubs can suffer.

“Look at Michael Owen getting injured for England and Newcastle losing his services for almost a year,” he said. “You can understand Newcastle’s real annoyance. They pay his wages and they paid big money for him to improve their position.

“I know that’s the way things go but it doesn’t mean that it’s any less galling.”