A damning article on the England players & performances

[Sir Tokyo Sexwale]

As the England squad made their way to a final training session in Nuremberg on the eve of their match against Trinidad & Tobago, their coach was escorted by eight police motorcycle outsiders, six police cars and one helicopter. At each road junction a couple of policemen held up the traffic for a full five minutes before the coach passed through, creating a cacophony of horn-blowing from irritated motorists whose lawful progress had been delayed by the transportation of what currently appears to be the most overrated and underperforming team at this World Cup.

 

That is the sort of bubble in which the England party exists. Goodness knows how much the Football Association has spent on providing the ultimate in de luxe quarters, transportation and security for the 23 players, the platoon of wives and girlfriends, and the battalion of support staff. The media, too, are the grateful beneficiaries of the FA's lavish attention to detail, welcomed each day to a vast purpose-built centre next to the training pitch and featuring air conditioning, wireless internet access, TV screens, comfortable sofas and a plentiful supply of excellent food.

The contrast with other nations is extreme. At Argentina's hotel, for instance, the daily press conferences are conducted in a medium-size room equipped with three trestle tables and a dozen or so bottles of mineral water.

 

Their coach, when it arrives from training, is accompanied by one police motorcyclist and one police car. You would never know that Argentina have won the World Cup twice to England's once and are rather more likely, on current form, to win it again. What does this have to do with football? Nothing that could be measured with ProZone equipment, perhaps, but quite a lot in less tangible terms, if one looks at the way England played in the opening matches, and particularly in the first hour against Trinidad & Tobago, when Sven-Goran Eriksson's starting XI - his first-choice team, with the exception of Wayne Rooney and Gary Neville - performed like a side whose bad days had all come at once.

 

As we have seen so many times in the past, England gave the impression of believing that they had only to turn up and the day would be theirs. It is not a question of laziness or absence of willpower; these are honest men, trying to do their honest best. But they have been seduced by their own celebrity into a delusory view of the nature of their task.

 

As David Beckham said earlier in the week, Sven-Goran Eriksson likes to create a relaxed environment for his players. Such an ambition is hard to criticise when the top players are rich and powerful enough to demand a say in how they are treated and can hardly be expected to endure even a temporary lowering of their standard of living. But the bubble in which they float has unquestionably cut them off from certain important realities.

 

Even those who watch them regularly and are used to their inherent weaknesses have been shocked to see them quite so bereft of the ability to make progress through basic passing and movement. For an hour on Thursday their midfield resembled a man who has been asked to write a novel in a foreign language, using only a quarter of the letters of the alphabet.

 

England have a perennial problem in the creative area - the area, oddly enough, in which they are supposed to be most abundantly supplied with talent - but in Nuremberg even their usual limited articulacy was reduced to the dimension of endlessly slanting balls over the head of Trinidad & Tobago's stand-in right-back. Fine as an occasional tactic, if properly executed, this became virtually England's sole means of making progress.

 

Their opponents, not surprisingly, found it easy to cope with players seemingly unwilling to attempt any kind of fluid interplay. Obsessed with getting the ball to Peter Crouch or Michael Owen at the earliest opportunity, the midfield quartet played in a straight line and left such gaping spaces between one another that the defenders' job of isolation and neutralisation was made easy.

 

Of all the individual causes for concern, that of Frank Lampard seems the most pressing, since his personal lack of form also has a direct impact on Steven Gerrard's contribution. It has often been said, and just as often denied by the players and their coach, that these two cannot work together as the central midfield pairing in a 4-4-2 formation. On Thursday they spent an hour reinforcing their critics' case and illustrating the extent of the malfunction at the heart of the team. Eriksson could do worse than ask Carlos Alberto Parreira for a video of Kaka's performance in Brazil's first game and show it to Lampard.

 

Parreira's team were generally disappointing against Croatia, but their No8's game - and not just his exquisite goal, which could have come from Lampard's highlights reel - provided a beacon of lucidity and fluency. The Chelsea man, by contrast, has reverted to the stereotype of his West Ham days, when his thinking and movement were often half a beat behind the game.

 

Apparently the latest tests identify him as the fittest member of the squad, which merely suggests that England's medical team are testing the wrong things. Only after the substitutions had been made did he start to look more like his better self, working from a position 15 yards further up the pitch.

 

The opening hour, however, proved that Eriksson would be courting disaster by persisting with Thursday's starting line-up. The senior players should be embarrassed by the ability of one 20-year-old to transform the side's mentality as well as its tactical approach, but Eriksson's steely insistence over the question of Wayne Rooney's return to fitness indicates that he, at least, is in no doubt of the central truth of England's campaign. Without Rooney's football intelligence, England are nothing more than a bunch of tourists, travelling first class.

 

 

8/1? 80/1 would be closer to value

[Nebraska Red]

Usual over the top journalism.

 

So what if the FA puts out a good spread for the press, players and families.

 

England has the players, but they have an asinine manager who has no fecking clue how to select a team that can play to its strengths.

[fyds]

In the end, what happens in the knockout games on the day is what counts - who wants it most and has a bit of luck will probably get it rather than who plays with style, or who desreves it - and that could be England as much as anyone else.

 

If you look at technically how good a team is, how much style and flare they have as the sole marker - then AC Milan must have won in Istanbul.

[aka Dus]

England don't have the players.

 

But they certainly neither have the manager.

 

Put Beenhacker in charge and you'd see a 10% improvement straight away (which is a lot at that level of football IMO).

[smithdown]

 

Put Beenhacker in charge and you'd see a 10% improvement straight away (which is a lot at that level of football IMO).

 

 

I was saying that the other night (he looks a bit of a hardknock him, a retired pimp or something). There's probably more than half a dozen managers at the WC who could walk in tomorrow and get more out of them and some of them will be on buttons compared to Sven.

[Benzo-13]

Picking Walcott and having the wives and girlfriends around so much is kamikaze tactics..

 

He's a chancer is Sven.

[Guest Cally77]

England don't have the players.

 

But they certainly neither have the manager.

 

Put Beenhacker in charge and you'd see a 10% improvement straight away (which is a lot at that level of football IMO).

 

Yes, he of Trinadad & Tobago fame.

 

All the top jobs must have been taken eh...

[aka Dus]

Yes, he of Trinadad & Tobago fame.

 

All the top jobs must have been taken eh...

 

At the risk of shielding myself in cliché, know your football sonny.

[_00_deathscar]

Yes, he of Trinadad & Tobago fame.

 

All the top jobs must have been taken eh...

 

Hiddink manages Australia, and will soon be managing Russia, and had managed South Korea.

 

Would you not say he's a top manager?

[smithdown]

Yes, he of Trinadad & Tobago fame.

 

All the top jobs must have been taken eh...

 

 

 

By the look of him its not a bad billet is it - being Trinidad and Tobago manager?

 

Fella looks like he hasn't had an early night in five years.