Does anyone else find international weekend boring?

Does anyone else feel a bit bored when qualifier international weeks come along?

All week I look forward to the fixtures ahead, go and do my accumulator, check my fantasy football team and set the Sky Plus for Match of the Day. Saturday I settle down to the end of Soccer Saturday to watch the scores come in and on Sunday I have the boys round for the double header. Normally a great weekend.

But this weekend I have found myself with much more time to twiddle my thumbs, maybe that's a good thing because I am not sitting around a computer or a television watching football, although I have found my way to the computer again to write this blog!

The reason for this feeling of emptiness of course is because it is international weekend. And worse still a weekend when England aren't even playing.

Fixtures have been moved to Friday nights and Tuesday nights and I think the Friday nights is a bad move because we football fans are creatures of habit, and it has taken us out of the comfort zone of our Saturday routine. What's more the qualifying campaigns very rarely bring out the tasty fixtures that a weekly league programme do, so with NI v Italy aside, you can successfully predict half the scores and it takes the excitement away.

It never used to be quite so bad because at least we had an England performance to dissect and while we can look forward to that on Tuesday, it was missing from Saturday afternoon.

On the other hand, international weekend probably boosted the ratings for lower league football, and Leagues One and Two carried a lot more excitement than the international programme.

It comes along every now and again and when groups get tighter and the end gets nearer it will no doubt be more exciting. But for now I'm glad the international weekend is over and after Tuesday we can all get back into the routine.