Want to know Roy's secret Don't cut out the middle men
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UPDATED:
22:34 GMT, 9 September 2012
Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard did not prove a point in Chisinau last week. You can’t prove anything against Moldova. All they did was showcase what can be achieved if a manager wants to earn his money. Together again in the heart of England’s midfield, the pair played as if under instruction. It isn’t too much to ask. It never has been.
Good for Roy Hodgson. He took a chance with an unpopular pairing and did so because he believed he could tell them what to do. In this way, he exploded the myth that a national manager does not have enough time to impart information to his players. What nonsense.
If a man has one training session, he can make a difference: and Hodgson had four days to make clear what he wanted.
Roy's boys: Hodgson has dictated the terms on how he wants the midfield to play
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Blame Sven Goran Eriksson for this fiction. Faced with a conundrum concerning two of the brightest players of their generation, he came up with a policy best described as don’t ask, don’t tell.
'Can Gerrard or Lampard play as a holding midfielder' he said in 2005. 'They can both do it but it is a question in their heads. Do they like to do it Are they prepared to do it We have never talked about it.'
Never talked about it Are they prepared to do it He was the England manager, for heaven’s sake. Find out. Instead, tournaments, opportunities, drifted by as Eriksson ignored the problem. It took Fabio Capello to address the compatibility issue successfully.
In qualifying for the 2010 World Cup, he played Lampard deep and central, Gerrard forward and starting wide. They were together in the team but rarely in proximity on the pitch. It worked perfectly.
Hodgson was even braver. /09/09/article-2200735-14E5EFFD000005DC-931_634x450.jpg” width=”634″ height=”450″ alt=”All smiles: England made a winning start in their campaign to reach Brazil 2014″ class=”blkBorder” />
All smiles: England made a winning start in their campaign to reach Brazil 2014
Yes, this group must evolve in time for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Tom Cleverley is an increasingly impressive figure for England and Hodgson will have his fingers crossed for Jack Wilshere, but until that time Gerrard and Lampard are his best options.
When Gerrard went off midway through in Moldova, the weak performance of Michael Carrick in his place revealed a gulf. A lot has been made of Carrick’s absence from international football yet there is a reason his career has stuttered under four managers. Billed as England’s Andrea Pirlo, he comes up just short.
His four competitive starts for England have all coincided with unconvincing team performances: against Ecuador in 2006, when a moribund display was rescued by a David Beckham free-kick, the 0-0 home draw with Macedonia that began the slide under Steve McClaren, the 2-0 reverse in Croatia that confirmed it, and the only qualifying defeat of Capello’s reign, 1-0 in Ukraine.
Hodgson may still decide to start Carrick against Ukraine again, as a buffer between Gerrard and Lampard, relieving them of some defensive duty — but, if he does, you can guarantee he will have talked about it. And planned for it. And coached it. That is what national managers do. The good ones, anyway.
Old stagers: Lampard and Gerrard impressed during the clash with Moldova
Keep it Real to make a deal…
There has been a correction from Radamel Garcia, father of Chelsea-fancying Atletico Madrid striker Falcao. His son, in fact, supports Real Madrid.
Radamel outed Falcao as a teenage Chelsea fan, coincidentally after he had scored a hat-trick against them in the UEFA Super Cup. Not that he was angling for a move.
Yet, if a week is a long time in politics, it is an absolute age when business is to be done, so it now transpires Falcao did not gaze adoringly at a Kerry Dixon poster in his bedroom in Santa Marta after all.
Real deal Falcao's dad has revealed his son is a fan of the Spanish giants
'Falcao's dream is to play for Real Madrid,' said daddy. 'Since he was a boy, he has always wanted to play for them.'
One can but wonder as the January window nears who else the ambitious 26-year-old will have dreamed of representing. AC Milan, Barcelona, Juventus, maybe even Manchester City.
'Father,' he would plead, 'feed the Goat and he will score…'
Brit special aren't we
As the parade passes, we will be piously informed once more that the Olympics has made us proud to be British. That it has shown us a new kind of patriotism, built around acceptance and inclusion, and a lot of other qualities Britain possessed anyway.
Let these pseudo-sages have their moment of revelation. For most of us, it did not take tickets for the Greco-Roman wrestling to engender a love for this country.
An interest in music, art, the absurd, literature, engineering, theatre, history, disco, science, socialism, jokes, or just the odd day with your eyes open watching the many cultures rub along together would see to that. This was not some new breed. This was us. As we are and as we can be, if we just remember this nation was built with politeness, too.
Jolly good show: London can be rightly proud of hosting memorable Olympic and Paralympic Games
This was the country that delivered the NHS, Shakespeare, the Forth Bridge and the blinding techno tune that played as the athletes paraded that first night at the Olympic Stadium. It’s called Rez, by the way, a nod to a long-extinct nightclub in Romford.
Those who think the Olympics made Britain special don’t get it. Britain made the Olympics special, not the other way around. Enjoy your day, all: you deserve it.
An open window
Michael Owen may make his Stoke debut against Manchester City next week.
How Who knows Owen was made a free agent by Manchester United at the end of last season. This means Stoke had months to make an honest man of him.
Yet, as Owen held out for better offers, Stoke delayed. They blew hot, blew cold and finally got the deal done just before the 5pm final registration deadline last Tuesday.
Rules are there to be broken! Stoke had already registered their 25 players before completing Owen's signing
At which point it transpired Stoke had already submitted a list of 25 players to the Premier League. They had to seek permission to change. Of course, they got it. Premier League chiefs are facilitators, not rulemakers.
They exist to help clubs do business, not to tell them what they cannot do; and if that means the odd episode of special dispensation, fair enough. So it isn’t transfer deadline day. Not really.
There’s deadline day and then, some days later, registration day and after that another little window just in case the last one didn’t suit. And every now and then there is a kerfuffle like the one over Carlos Tevez to make us believe we have regulations; but we don’t.
And while we're at it…
Taking the Michel: Platini is shaking up the Euro qualifying format
And now the latest instalment of an irregular — although, sadly, not very — series, entitled Michel Platini, Professional Dope, in which we follow the president of UEFA through his many clownish attempts to regulate football in Europe.
This week: Adventures in Broadcasting.
You will be aware that one of Platini’s more brilliant schemes involved expanding the European Championship, the world’s most immediately exhilarating football tournament, from 16 teams to 24, thus killing it stone dead.
You may also recall that UEFA insisted on centralising television rights contracts for national associations in future qualifying campaigns with the promise that, through them, countries will receive more money.
Well, astonishingly, the prospect of a 52-team tournament — hosts France excluded from the process, obviously — with almost half the competitors going through to the finals is not proving the draw Platini (right) reckoned. The prospect of endless dead rubbers as leading and middling nations saunter through to finish top three in a group of five, or six, is not considered TV gold.
Having hoped to build a Champions League-style rights auction, the most doom-laden estimates now suggest UEFA could be short by as much as 320million and would have to meet that from its own cash reserves of 400m. And, as amusing as this would be, it means UEFA are now considering further interference to maintain interest.
One idea is to allocate top seeding places at the finals purely on qualification performance, to encourage the strongest nations to continue fielding their best teams in meaningless matches at the end of the group stage. Yet it is not the personnel that make a match exciting but its meaning.
A full-strength England team at home to Bulgaria is still a bore if nothing is riding on it; a half-strength England team playing the same match and needing to win is a cup final. And, with 24 teams heading to France and 16 progressing to the knock-out round, what difference would seeding make
If two-thirds of teams go through, who cares about being first or second out of the pot What a mess. Still, all in a day’s work for Michel Platini, PD (Professional Dope). Tune in for the next thrilling instalment.
Phew, footballers can now rest easy
The one set of people who will not be unhappy to see the end of Britain’s Olympic summer are professional footballers. No more false or negative comparisons, no more lessons in morality from the pulpit, no more bogus juxtapositions.
Last week, the funding for Britain’s Paralympians, 50million, was compared to Wayne Rooney’s earnings in the same period, also 50m, as if the two were equal.
Yet Rooney’s salary is paid by a private company so actually costs the country nothing, while the Paralympic grant costs, well, 50m. Indeed, as Rooney is taxed at 50 per cent, the country is actually millions up on his deal.
A cut above: Rooney's earnigns were compared to the figure spent on Paralympians
Yet a headline explaining how Rooney funded a big chunk of Britain’s Paralympic team would not conform to the fashionable narrative.
Every Olympian is inspiring, every footballer is a lout. In the case of the Manchester City youth player held over a fatal car crash, he was variously described in headlines as a ‘star’ or an ‘ace’. His name Courtney Meppen-Walter. No, me neither.
Yet it suited the stereotype of the reckless, overpaid footballer to pretend this kid was a household name. The equivalent would be calling an 18-year-old hurdler at Enfield Harriers who got nicked for shoplifting an Olympian.
Rise of the owner-manager
Nowhere has the rise of the owner-manager been more acutely felt than at Blackburn Rovers, where the influence of bogus advisors and boardroom pig-headedness led to the demise of one manager, Sam Allardyce, and the appointment of an inferior replacement, resulting in relegation.
Now Steve Kean confesses he has not even seen three of his deadline-day signings play live, having come as recommendations from Blackburn’s global advisor Shebby Singh.
It is dangerous enough when these owner-manager schemes are headed up by men like Roman Abramovich, who provide the investment to support their whims; when it is the work of mere stooges, calamity awaits.
