Living in my disconnected bubble as I am at the moment, I managed somehow to become convinced that the England-Argentina “friendly” was today. So I stayed in yesterday evening and continued to sort through three years of photographic, prints, negatives, and scans. Par-tee! Even if I didn’t see it, it’s nice to know that one of the best football teams in the World gave a satisfying kicking (or, in this case, nutting) to the fat-bloke-in-a-pub consensus. I wonder when the “the Argies weren’t really trying” bollocks will start.
The football-war connection is not intentional, but at least I remembered what day it was today and shed a silent tear onto my ironing at 11:00. I’m just the kind of Real Man who would have sent the Nazis packing.
The fat-bloke-in-the-pub consensus started in earnest on Saturday night just after the final whistle. Don’t you listen to Radio Five Live phone-ins?
Dear God, no. I’ve got (slightly) better things to do with my time.
Even the broadsheet sports pages seem to have only two responses to England games: “it was a triumph” or “it was a disaster”. With the broadsheets it’s more frequently the latter.
The truth is boring, but pleasing: The English Premiership contains many of the finest players in the World today and most of the players in the England squad are fully capable of mixing with that elite. Under Eriksson England have only lost four competitive matches. One was, admittedly, a huge embarrassment; two of the others were because Beckham didn’t convert penalties; and the other was against those plucky minnows Brazil, making a special effort for the World Cup finals.
The most telling thing about the win against Argentina was the admission by their coach that England’s performance had left his players physically exhausted. I don’t think we’ll win the World Cup, but we have a realistic chance, and dismissing England, as Chris does, as not being World-class is just a sneery pose.
I think that the only achilles heel is Erikson’s motivational abilities. In sticking with Beckham, he’s undoubtedly doing the right thing because of the leadership and competitive edge he brings (as well is his extraordinary abilty to see, time and make agressive passes). Beckham does what Erikson can’t here.
But a manager that can’t motivate a national side to perform against minnows can be a bit of a problem in the World Cup. Minnows acutally won the European Championships because a lot of other sides have this problem.
This was one thing Cloughie was great at. He used to tell his sides that, when they were playing an (old) Division Three team, that they were playing a side that would make them play Division Three football. He’d convince his players that they had to prove that they could outplay a Div3 team by playing better Div3 football against them. Because big teams these days have a large squad and put out B-teams for cup games, a lot of them have almost no experience of playing against lower-league grafters.
And Cloughie never bothered worrying about motivating them for big games – he knew they did that for themselves. In fact, he’d do anything to get them forget they were playing a big match, including feeding them with booze and getting them half-cut on the way to the game.
I can’t see Erikson doing that, can you?
But, like you, I’m still optimistic on the whole.