Andros Townsend: the man who hates England "It's very simple," you will overhear someone saying in the pub or on the radio. Too many foreigners. "Nah, Football League feeder clubs," suggests someone else. "More futsal," cries another. "No," interrupts the first person, getting irate now, "you cut off the top, rip out the seeds and pith, cut around the stalk and then chop as normal." "I can't believe what I'm hearing," the second person retorts. You cut around the stalk, pull it out and the seeds come out with it. People like you make me sick. These are febrile times, and in Roy Keane, ITV has the perfect face for our snarling age. What makes Keane such a good pundit is that he clearly could not give a stuff who wins. Keane hates England, but not as much as he hates football, which even then only hints at the acrid loathing he feels for the entire planet and everything in it. Even in old photographs, when he is winning things with Manchester United, he never actually appears happy. Instead, his expression is more a feral, guttural roar, as if it is all he can do to stop himself biting a gigantic chunk out of the Premier League trophy and spitting the metal shards into Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's eye. "He's got too much confidence," he said of Joe Hart, a goalkeeper painfully and patently short of confidence. I would have dropped him six months ago. At half-time, with the score 0-0: "England have certainly not tested the keeper enough. Too many touches on the ball. Perhaps the consequent 4-1 victory would mollify him. There's always question marks over England. There was a lot of nervous tension about the place. Surely, though, Keane would have some words of praise for Townsend on his sparkling debut? There's obviously question marks about what he does defensively, but when he's that good going forward you'll forgive him. Coming from Keane, that will probably have to suffice. Yet there remains a certain validity to Keane's pessimism. This is, after all, a country still in thrall to the quick fix, the haloed redeemer, the instant panacea. If not Adnan Januzaj, then Ross Barkley. If not him, then Ravel Morrison. If not him, then Greg Dyke, or Glenn Hoddle. What about smaller goals for kids? Another centre of excellence! Gazza as coach! And so on, and so on, until the pepper lies in smithereens: pith, seeds and all. The irony is that the haze was just starting to lift. We were emerging from our delusion, beginning to accept our diminished place in the world. Failure to qualify for Brazil would have been the final stage in the process. And then along came Townsend, with his foul twinkling toes and his decrepitly clean strike of a football, vindictively tempting us all to dream again. If England collapse in a heap on Tuesday night, remember who got your hopes up in the first place. If a distaste towards our national institutions renders one unpatriotic, then Townsend's flagrant disregard of the cherished English footballing traditions of melancholy, introspection, despair and rancour should disturb everyone who loves this country.