RooneyGate2: The Smoke Clears and We Assess the Future

“Miracles happen in life now and then.” I’m sorry, but this is not how you want your national team manager assessing the chance’s of your country’s best forward five weeks before the team’s first World Cup match.

Rooney is almost certainly out. And whether it’s the fault of the pitch or the boots, it’s a done deal. Not even this is gonna work.

So.

What next?

Well, it seems clear to me that with only one guaranteed healthy forward on the squad — gangly Pete Crouch — Sven has got to create a scheme in which he takes advantage of what until now had seemed a luxury and is obviously his only remaining choice: Use that over-packed midfield in a more complex offensive scheme.

Over at the BBC website, a series of formations is being discussed by fans and pundits: a 4-4-2 (presuming Michael Owen is fit, which I don’t), a 4-5-1 (my personal favorite), a 4-1-4-1 (Arsenal style — I object on moral grounds), and a 4-4-1-1.

The benificiaries of this type of thinking will be the pacier players in the squad (Jermaine Defoe, Shawn Wright-Phillips) and some of the players who have been on the bubble and whom Sven might call up now for speed (Darren Bent, Darius Vassell) or Rooney-ish muscularity (Andrew Johnson). Sven is a moderately creative tactician — no Scolari, on the one hand, no McClaren, on the other — and he’s lucky, in hind sight, that so much was unsettled up to now: He doesn’t have to break down a firmly-established scheme. But he’s gonna earn his money in the next month.

But whatever happens, for God’s sake let’s hope he doesn’t push John Terry into anything. If the only stable center back goes down, England are over.