Time to Drop Eriksson's Favourite Son
At the end, the recurring thought was: "Is that it?" Was there nothing more to England's chal-lenge than fierce resistance, the usual inquest over a disallowed goal and, of course, the grim suspense of penalties? This summer, it wasn't meant to end like that.
Though the team is young enough for the wounds to heal, scars will remain. Opinions will be revised. This was the England team that would rewrite history. Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Paul Scholes and David Beckham would be the best midfield in the tournament. The team was put to the test and it failed. Despite all the hopeful talk of Germany two years from now, the team is not as good as it is cracked up to be.
The greatest weakness lies in the leadership, on and off the pitch. Sven-Goran Eriksson has brought calmness to the squad and he has instilled a quiet confidence in a nurnber of his players. It is confidence that come what may, he will pick them. Those players like him and support him, but it is no way to manage a football team.
Even within the Camp of the Favoured, there is a hierarchy and Beckham sits at its summit Untouchable. How badly didbe have to play to be substituted? Scholes was replaced in every gamc, Larnpard was replaced against Croatia, Gerrard against Portugal, while England's least effective midfielder remained to the end. It tells much about how Eriksson goes about his job. He has the aura of sophisti-cation but not the substance. Whatever the game plan for the matches against France and Portugal, it was undone by scoring the first goal. To fall back and try to defend for most of the match against the Portuguese was depressing. By scoring a goal, England hurt themselves more than the opposition.
Twenty-six minutes from the end of their quarter-final in Lisbon on Friday evening, Greece took the lead against France the tournament favourites, and would have been forgiven for funnelling back into their own half and protecting their one goal advantage. But not by their manager, Otto Rehhagel. He stood at halfway, screeching at his team to get on the ball and take the game to France, waving his arms as he desperately tried to move them upfield.
The previous night Eriksson sat in his place, hoping his team might get away with it, and because England's players give so much and fight so courageously, they went close. It could have ended differently and one always had the sense that Eriksson might get lucky. He didn't, and the point is that he didn't deserve to.
Consider again his modus operandi. As manager of England, he places his trust in those he sees as his big players. Beckham, Sol Campbell, Rio Ferdinand, Steven Gerrard and Michael Owen. He supports his key men and, no matter what, they support him. Management made easy? Alas, it is not so simple.
Such blind, unquestioning support generates complacency. How else does one explain Beckham's state of fitness when the squad began their preparations for Portugal 2 at a training camp in Sardinia? A number of England's back-from team were alarmed that a player normally among the most fit should be one of the least fit. Beckham never recovered from that starting point.
Asked on Friday if he was n happy with Beckham's fitness when the squad got together, Eriksson said: "David was one of the players who had to do extra work [on the training ground]. Altogether there were four or five who needed extra el work. David was one of them."
Beckham himself said he was in surprised how much fitness he dr lost during the interval between bc the end of the Spanish season and meeting up with England.
Such surprises should not be possible for a 29-year-old professional sportsman, especially one about to captain his country at the second biggest international tournament. More than most players, Beckham depends upon high energy levels make an impact. Without those energy levels, he is a very, very ordinary player.
Stung by queshons about his performance as captain, Beckham spoke on Friday about the media pressures he has had to endure in Madrid. He has been clearly affected by the unrelenting glare of attention but doesn't understand that he has been the author of his misfortune. Did he have to sell his wedding to a celebrity, did he have to change his hairstyle for every England match, did he have to wear his alice band and get himself photographed the day affer his contretemps with Sir Alex Ferguson? Did he have to do all of those ads? Did he have to have so much attention?
In their creation of an icon, the media were not working on their own. Team Beckham played a considerable part. They wanted him to be the best-paid footballer, and they succeeded. But the "success" came at a price.
At a critical moment in his career, it distracted Beckham blurred his focus, affected his training and, as a result, it reduced him to utter mediocrity in England's four tournament games.
Because of the little club that Eriksson has built with his squad, there was nothing he ' could do about it. Beckham had to be defended. The manager said he thought Beckham "did very well and showed great discipline in the way he played". Forget that he rarely made a cross, do not make a fuss about his half-hearted defence and do not even mention that he did not have the energy to get into scoring positions.
Beckham showed character in rebuilding his career after the trauma of a harsh sending-off against Argentina at the World Cup of 1998. It will be more difficult now, because on the crass journey to the summit of celebrity, he has deluded himself. So it wasn't his fault that he missed the first penalty on Thursday evening. "Look," he said, pointing to the ground, "it's the uneven penalty spot."
Somebody reminded him of the missed penalty in Istanbul last year and he said that shouldn't count as a miss: "I slipped, that's not a miss." Asked how he felt about his performances in Portugal, he replied that he would give himself "a seven out of 10 for effort". Without taking things for granted, one expects effort from England's players. In all of the other categories, Beckham would have scored nowhere near seven.
The abiding memory is of Gary Neville preparing to take a free kick on the right inside his own half. As the full-back looked up in search of a target, his eyes didn't linger for more than a fraction of a second on his former teammate. All that Neville saw was Beckham's back as the midfielder jogged upfield, and the message was unmistakable. Beckham didn't want the ball.
Unable to lift himself, there was no chance he could inspire those around him. And so England were bereft of leadership. The retreat towards goal, the massing of ranks behind the ball, the surrender of possession, the tame decision to contain rather than confront the opposition: it happened because there was nobody there to insist that it didn't happen. Eriksson and Beckham were not the men England needed them to be.
Eriksson's passivity has been a particular disappointment. Before the last World Cup, he appointed the Dutch physical therapist Richard Smith to work with the England squad. Smith reckoned that such was the physical condition of the English players that they could not hope to win in the Far East. As well as the injuries carried into the tournament by Nicky Butt, Beckham and Kieron Dyer, many other players didn't have the condition to survive an intense four-week tournament.
Smith proposed to Eriksson and the FA that he would work with the England players in between major tournaments and ensure that they turned up for international duty in the best possible condition. It was an intelligent if expensive proposal, but Smith's credentials were outstanding and it was difficult to see how England would win a major tournament unless its players moved on to a different level of physical conditioning.
At the time the FA were trying to reduce costs and they were unsure about Eriksson. So, partly to put him in his place, tbey said no to Smith. Eriksson accepted the decision meekly. The price for saying no to Smith was paid over the last month: four or five players showing up with poor fitness levels and a team that was utterly exhausted during the second half and extra time of the match against Portugal.
Even with a weak manager and a celebrity captain, one imagined the richly talented Gerrard would naturally come to the centre of the stage. Though he performed well, the Liverpool skipper was not at his best. Too often against the Portuguese, he gave the ball away and he remains vulnerable to his old failing of wanting to hit the killer pass every time. But one senses, too, Gerrard's disgruntlement with the regime.
It needed only one substitution and he was shunted to the left side of midfield, where he is clearly out of position. Eriksson needs to recognise Gerrard as his outstanding central midfield player and to organise things around him. Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger don't reposition Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira on the left side of midfield during the course of a game. Even with the onset of mild cramp, Gerrard should not have been substituted against the Portuguese, not with Beckham still on the pitch.
There will be no complete recovery from this latest failure without Eriksson showing qualities that up to now have been notable by their absence. He needs to know why his captain and three or four other players showed up in poor physical condition and be reassured that, at least in his captain's case, it can never happen again. There is a further need to point out that the old arrangement of mutual and blind loyalty no long exists.
Beckham must be judged and treated like any other player. Reality has to be ushered back into this arena. But it shall not come from the skipper. Asked about his performance as captain, Beckham said: "I will not be resigning my position as England captain. I am proud to be part of this team. I love playing football and I am England captain and I won't be resigning that position unless someone wants me to and that someone will be the manager."
So far the manager has shown no stomach for the kind of confrontations that are sometimes necessary to get the best out of people. Everything he says is plausible but safe. He admitted he would have taken off Beckham, "if I could change more than two or three players". What does that mean?
The danger for England is that the team is becoming a reflection of its manager. Plausible and- safe. "Portugal," he reminded us afterwards, "are technically the best team in this tournament. By that I mean they are the best at retaining possession." So, he invited us to conclude, was it not natural that they should control the match? Too easy, far too easy.
This is an England that needs to be shaken up. The difficulty is that it is the shakers, the manager and his captain, who are the ones most in need of being shaken up themselves.
Culled from Times of London.
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