The Hindu : Change of philosophy England's only hope

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jun 05, 2002

Sport

Sport - Football

Change of philosophy England's only hope

By Paul Hayward

TOKYO JUNE 4. A Japanese newspaper, The Daily Yomiuri, led its front page the other day with the headline, `Draw opens World Cup in Japan'. Underneath the hardly shattering news of a footballing stalemate was a much smaller story headed, `US to resume making triggers for nuclear warheads'.

The first thing you need to know about World Cup-hosting countries is that proportion goes out of the window. A 1-1 draw can knock a global crisis into the news-in-brief. So this is probably no time to be making apocalyptic statements about England's performance against Sweden on Sunday, which was the latest in a succession of backward steps along Route One.

Not since Euro 2000 have England's celebrity-encrusted squad so obviously faced the wrong direction. The more games we see here, the more plain it becomes that Sven-Goran Eriksson's team has gone back into the dark age of the long ball.

If the public at home hears the clip-clop of a hobbyhorse then they ought to be offering it water and a stable for the night. Eriksson's sudden abandonment of the passing game is too important to go unchallenged. On Sunday's evidence, England has no right to be on the same pitch as Argentina, Brazil and Italy, the leading lights thus far. The depressing sense that the superpowers are playing a different type of game has returned for English supporters just when they thought an eminent European coach was leading them out of obscurity.

For four days the real luminaries have paraded peacock-like across the Far Eastern stage, leaving England's most capable players stuck in the half-lit world of the pseudo-premiership grappling match (for this is what England-Sweden was). Eriksson's record as a club manager is above reproach. Nor is his achievement in raising England from the bottom to the top of World Cup qualifying Group Nine open to doubt. But the International Rescue days are over. He has three more days to correct his aberration and stop England plunging over a tactical abyss.

Consider this. Ronaldo, Raul, Christian Vieri and Gabriel Batistuta have already scored at this tournament and most of the games have achieved an impressively high technical level. Argentina pulverised Nigeria with patient, selfish passing, switching the direction of its attacks through a surfeit of midfield playmakers. Against Turkey in Ulsan on Monday, Brazil mocked the idea that it has become a team of bullies, too European in its obsession with defence and wholly anti-fun. The natural exuberance of Brazilian football was evident above all in Ronaldo's spectacular return to form.

The emotional complication, of course, was Rivaldo's disgraceful and craven reaction to having the ball kicked against his legs by Turkey's Hakan Unsal as he was preparing to take a corner. Jack-knifed on the ground, Brazil's most naturally gifted player held his face and head as if he had been brained. A digression - but a worthy one, for it brings us back to English football's traditional so-called `strengths'. Intolerance of cheating is one of the better ones. Believing that tournaments can be won by bypassing the midfield and launching howitzers to pacey strikers is one of the more persistent delusions. Teddy Sheringham's craft is to establish a conduit between midfield and attack, keep possession, see openings and slow the pace of the team's forward play to a more cerebral rhythm. In Saitama on Sunday night, Sheringham never got out of his tracksuit as the attempted barnstorming looked less and less likely to succeed.

The history of major championships is peppered with hysterical outbursts to poor first results. But those who argue that England is simply feeling its way forget that Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Germany, Spain and even the Republic of Ireland all managed something rather more promising than an abject opening night.

Again England is out of synch, in philosophy and execution. No worthwhile comparison can be drawn between last year's 5-1 win over Germany in Munich and the ordeal that awaits Eriksson's men in Sapporo on Friday. A country with England's wealth and history ought to be able to prosper at international level without having to tell itself folk stories about the night it upset the odds and impaled the Dutch or the Germans.

English clubs are sufficiently influential abroad for supporters to expect the national side to look and sound like the best half-dozen teams at a World Cup. Brazil was what it said they would be on the box.

Anxiety - or an inability to cope with, and adapt to, adversity - is becoming an increasingly prominent feature of Eriksson's teams. And that trend is unlikely to be reversed by the manager ordering them to play in a style that is contrary to everything they are being taught by their clubs.

At Bayern Munich, nobody ever told Owen Hargreaves that his job was to chip 30-yard balls for his strikers to chase like gun dogs.

In this mindset, England is already in its terminal lurch towards the exit. This is no time for the players to lose themselves in a fog of rhetoric about the Hand of God and St-Etienne. Its only hope is for Eriksson to abandon his little stylistic detour, which has produced one victory in eight games, and return to the values that are now upheld by England's biggest clubs. The players know it's true. — Copyright, Telegraph Group Ltd., London, 2002

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