Now that the pain has dulled: thoughts on England

November 23rd, 2007 | by: Matthew | View Comments

I’m feeling a bit better about things now after a horrible day of blind fury. So let’s step back and try to assess, rationally, what went wrong. And what went right. And to be positive, I’ll start with that. The Good:

Peter Crouch: Literally the only man on the pitch for the whole 90 minutes who seemed to give a shit about the outcome. Crouch fought for the ball, created chances, and capitalised on Beckham’s superb cross to create England’s only deserved goal of the evening. Why Rafa Benitez won’t play the man I’ll never know.

David Beckham: Literally the only other man on the pitch at any time who seemed to give a shit about the outcome. He may only have played for 45 minutes, but England created more chances and looked more threatening when he was there, and England’s only justifiable goal was the product of his perfect cross onto Peter Crouch’s chest. Let’s just hope the MLS keeps him fit enough to stick with the England squad, even if only as an impact substitute. He sure as hell made an impact in this game.

Frank Lampard: His performance may have been one step up from a small boy in a park, but I had a good laugh when the stadium announced that he’d won man-of-the-match. In a game as crap as this, that’s enough of a positive for me. On the downside, I was – and still am – very offended that someone at Wembley awarded man-of-the-match to Frank Lampard rather than Peter Crouch (the only deserving English player) or … well … any of the Croatian players, as each of them played better than pretty much every English player other than Crouch and Beckham.

And now, The Bad:

Scott Carson: I’ll be honest and say that I agreed with this decision at the time, but playing Scott Carson was almost certainly a mistake. In a game as big as this one, you can’t afford to have a young, third choice goalkeeper trying to work through his nerves. David James would have been a better choice.

Wayne Bridge: The man’s barely Championship standard, let alone a decent replacement for Ashley Cole. Based on his performance on Wendnesday, McClaren would have been better off playing a half-fit Cole than a fully-fit Bridge.

Sol Campbell: He just looks old, and he shouldn’t be asked to put on an England shirt again – it’s just not fair on a man who was a great player for England. Croatia’s attack made him look like a doddering pensioner.

Joleon Lescott: Maybe he played so badly against Russia because he was out of position. Wait … no.

Micah Richards: He’s still one of England’s best prospects for the future, but can someone knock some brains into the lad? His positioning was off and his marauding runs into the penalty area, while creating a few chances, left England’s right wing badly unprotected and left him stranded from the Croatian attack far too often, in one case leading to a Croatian goal.

Shaun Wright-Phillips: Even Ian Wright said he wasn’t playing very well, which is about as damning as it gets. Replacing him with Beckham was one of the few things McClaren did right.

Frank Lampard: He may have made me laugh by receiving the Man-of-the-Match award, but bloody hell, the man did next to nothing for most of the ninety minutes. One of the guys watching the game with me commented, “Is it just me, or did Frank Lampard suddenly appear in the middle of the game to take a penalty, and then vanish again?”

Steven Gerrard: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Steven Gerrard can’t play in an England shirt, and certainly not alongside Frank Lampard. He played reasonably well when paired with Gareth Barry in the past, but it’s telling that Barry – and not he – won man-of-the-match in all those games, when you would have expected a newly-freed-up Gerrard to be playing in his element. Let’s be honest: either play him on the right, as at Liverpool, or don’t play him at all.

Joe Cole: Didn’t really accomplish much, but he’s almost a positive. Worked hard, which is about the best you can say. Trouble is that he’s not really a left-winger: he’s right-footed, for one, which means he ends up cutting into the centre rather than doing his job and attacking down the left. It’s not Cole’s fault, but it did hamper his game.

Gareth Barry: Showed himself up as above-average but far from world-class with his first match against truly world-class opposition. The only other thing McClaren got right on Wednesday night was getting rid of him at half-time.

What else went wrong? The tactics:

I’m not one of those who will lay this entirely on the shoulders of McClaren: if any of England’s players had put in a performance this bad for their club, they’d have been on the bench for the next five fixtures. The key problem was the the players didn’t seem to give a damn, or have any desire to play a real game of football. McClaren is responsible for sending out a team that was incapable and unwilling to play together, and for using new and untried tactics against the best team in England’s qualifying group. What boggles my mind is that McClaren, after Michael Owen’s injury, seemed to have no contingency plan for being left with a solitary fit world-class striker in his squad. Considering Owen and Rooney’s propensity for injuries, surely a competent manager would have devoted some thought to his tactics in the (likely) event that Michael Owen injured himself while reading to his son, or while sitting quietly in a chair, let alone in a friendly match against Austria. The players deserve a lot of blame for playing what was, by all accounts, an appalling game of football. McClaren deserves to be shot for allowing them to get away with it.