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Should there really be a GB FC?

Brian Taylor | 19:25 UK time, Monday, 25 August 2008

Sport can provoke quite exceptional extremes of passion: delight, despair and bitterness. And it's even worse among the participants.

How about that Aussie comment to the effect that Team GB could only win at sports where they took part sitting down? Just marvel at the bile that generated that gag.

Now that Team GB - or shouldn't that be Team UK - are on their way back, having successfully piloted their huge haul of medals through the airport metal detectors, there's fresh argument.

Longer term, we will be able to pick over the cost and capacity of the London preparations for 2012.

Right now, the sport of choice is to work out whether there should be an all-UK football team taking part in those games four years off.

GB backs Team GB at footy. The Prime Minister reckons it would be daft to skip a sport which Britain gave to the world.
He believes he can reassure the sundry football associations who fear that Team GB at the Olympics would lead to Team GB in the European Championships, the World Cup or even a GB-calculated entry in the club championships.

Of course, Mr Brown makes this point purely on a sporting basis. The thought of advancing his cause of Britishness never entered his mind. In response, Alex Salmond says such a notion is nonsense.

The fans, he says, are against it. It would jeopardise Scotland's place in international football competition. And for what? To allow an under-23 side with perhaps a couple of Scots to enter the Olympics.

Mr Salmond, of course, makes this case purely on a sporting basis. The thought...you get the concept.

For the purposes of this blog, I'm going to act as referee. (Hopefully, one who knows that the game is called football for a reason and that one is not allowed to score goals with one's hands. Bitter, me?)

Seriously, it's over to you. Should there be an all-UK football team in the Olympics next time round? State your reasons succinctly. Me, I'd settle for Team DU putting one over Cowdenbeath in whatever the League Cup is called these days.

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