Just to limit his options further, Bournemouth, who must beat Wrexham in their final game on Saturday to have any chance of avoiding relegation from the Second Division, have requested the striker Warren Feeney does not play the full 90 minutes.All this has left McIlroy increasingly frustrated and he said: “I can’t believe this. It’s just one thing after another and I don’t know what kind of side I’m going to put out. What sort of preparation is this to face a world-class side like Spain? You look at the bench and, with kids like Pat McCourt and Gavin Melaugh, it’s going to be like a kindergarten.”. It says something for the level of Matt Jansen’s international expectations that he had already booked his summer holidays when told he had been called up by England. His father has already stated his preference to watch Matt in Japan than see Joe Jansen walk Astrid up the aisle.

“I’m sure it will be forgiven,” he smiled.As Darius Vassell demonstrated in Amsterdam, one touch, one goal, can take you a very long way and tomorrow the Blackburn striker will have perhaps as little as 45 minutes against Paraguay to make his case.Jansen would settle for that. When he failed to make Sven Goran Eriksson’s squad which was to be beaten by Italy last month, he reasoned that there was little point building up his hopes. In the depths of his mind may have lurked the suspicion that he was still suffering the after-effects of a three-month ban imposed on himself, Seth Johnson and Lee Hendrie after the trio broke a curfew during England’s disastrous display in the European Under-21 Championships in Slovakia.”When it happened it was too soon for me to be called into any squad, but since Graeme Souness came in as manager he has been playing me as an out-and-out striker and my form’s been better.”Had Eriksson selected a striker from Blackburn with the World Cup in mind, you would have imagined Andy Cole might have been sitting in front of the microphones of England’s hotel in the Cheshire countryside. But it appears the man who has scored more European goals for Manchester United than anyone else will have to come to terms with the fact that his international days are done.”I spoke to Andy this morning and he wished me all the best and gave me a hug,” said Jansen, who acknowledges that Cole’s arrival at Ewood Park has honed his own game, both in teaching him movement off the ball and creating space for Jansen’s own talents to shine. “We are short of strikers at the club, I was playing as a lone forward and I’m not the biggest bloke in the world so I struggled. But since Andy’s come it’s been a breath of fresh air.”It has been a strange, almost surreal season at Ewood Park.

Their victory over Tottenham in the Worthington Cup final has ensured Blackburn’s participation in the Uefa Cup and they might with a little more luck have beaten both Arsenal and Manchester United home and away. Yet they have lost home and away to Derby County and Sunderland and were well beaten by Leicester, results which when consigned to the pages of Rothman’s Football Yearbook will seem inexplicable.”We seem to lift our game for the most important matches and I have every confidence I can make the step up, internationally,” said Jansen “I have learned a lot from Graeme Souness. His style is to toughen you up but, before, he said I was running down blind alleys and said I was a ‘bit of a circus act’. He’s pleased with the way I have come on.”Ever since taking his first steps in the professional game in the exciting side Mervyn Day fashioned at Carlisle, which produced the likes of Seth Johnson and Rory Delap, it seemed a given that the policeman’s son from the Border Country would one day play for England.At 24 he is still young but his chance might have arrived earlier had he made different choices.