There has been a huge influx, even a preponderance, of foreigners into the Premiership, but there are still quite enough native gifted footballers, provided they play to their potential, to give England a more than decent team.
There was once an American strip cartoon called ‘I Go Pogo’. A clever piece of satire, it was essentially about a group of animals in the swamps of Louisiana but it had, you might say, a sting in its tail. I remember especially a sequence in which the animals are making their way through the Everglades under drenching rain. Depressed and soaked, they decide to vote on a new leader, and appoint the alligator. Whereupon it soon stops raining. “There you are ,” says the alligator, proudly. “Ain’t got nothing to do with you,” say the others. To which the alligator makes the classic retort, “Happened during my administration, didn’t it?”
Swap Fabio Capello for the alligator and you’ll see what I mean. That ecstatic 4-0 win for England in Zagreb happened under his administration, but the flood of sycophantic Press praise which has alighted on him takes no account of the realities of the situation. After all, only days earlier, many of the same people had been excoriating the dim display given by England in Barcelona, where they scraped home 2-0 against feeble if aggressive Andorra.
How bold it was, we are told, for Capello to “gamble” on Theo Walcott, who exuberantly rewarded him with three goals. But what kind of a gamble was that? True, through no fault at all of his own, Walcott made an anticlimactic beginning in international football when Sven Goran Eriksson, in a moment of sheer fatuity, called the 17-year-old (with just one England appearance behind him) up to the World Cup in Germany then didn’t even give him a game. Which meant, into the ill thought out bargain, barring the way to a more experienced player who might indeed have been called up.
But by the end of last season, it was perfectly plain that Walcott was a formidable force to be reckoned with. This on the basis of three coruscating performances for Arsenal, who bought him as an expensive 17-year-old from Southampton. Twice against Milan, once at Liverpool, in the European Champions Cup, he showed superb pace, skill and enterprise.
Overcautiously used as a substitute on the right-flank by Arsene Wenger, who’s still making cautioning noises about him, he ripped the left-flank of the Milan defence first in London, where Emmanuel Adebayor squandered a glorious heading chance to win the game, then at San Siro where, served by Walcott again, Adebayor could hardly miss. So to the next round at Anfield where Walcott set off on an amazing 80-yard run, which produced another goal.
If he could do all this under the pressure of such “big” matches, where was the risk of putting him on in Zagreb? Far more to the point in assessing Capello, now seen by some as a master tactician, is surely his previous, deft, obstinate insistence on constantly sticking the clapped out David Beckham, now playing for a struggling club in a minor league in USA which persists in calling itself “Major” out on that right-flank. Without the speed or the will to take on and go past an opponent, heading for the line or, in Walcott’s case in Zagreb, direct for goal.
Even in Barcelona, against Andorra, and in Zagreb, Capello could not wholly suppress his Beckham obsession. He brought him on in both games as an irrelevant very late substitute, with some 10 minutes in Barcelona, about a mere five in Zagreb. Yet, what of David Bentley who may not lately have been at his best with Blackburn Rovers, who tend now, under Paul Ince, to move him inside, but who is unquestionably one of the most talented right-sided English players of the day? When England, last season, lost drearily in Paris, he had to wait for 63 minutes before Beckham was at last taken off and he could play. In Zagreb, where Beckham did play, albeit so briefly, Bentley, scandalously, wasn’t even on the bench.
Broadly speaking, however, Capello, in Zagreb, seems to have seen the light, his 4-4-2 formation with Gareth Barry and an improved Frank Lampard in central midfield, even making light of the absence of Steven Gerrard. But how, in Barcelona, could he initially exclude Joe Cole, destined to save his face with a couple of goals when he came on as a belated sub, and prefer in Stewart Downing of Middlesbrough a left-winger who has consistently failed at international level?
Much has been said of Capello giving his team discipline and confidence. In that case why was near performance so poor against Andorra with Zagreb just days away? The claims that new discipline and confidence had been instilled in the players in so short a space of time is ludicrous. What happened was that at long last, and for the first time, Capello picked the best team available, with a decent balance. Though I have to admit that I didn’t expect so robustly effective performance, leading the attack and complementing a hugely improved Wayne Rooney, as there came from Emile Heskey. One read that Capello watched him recently playing for Wigan at West Ham and that this, implicitly, was what decided him. But I was there too, that afternoon, and apart from the neat flick on with which Heskey set up Wigan’s goal, I thought he was largely a peripheral figure. Nor could he be said to have shone when he came on at Wembley against the Czechs; a game which England undeservedly saved by the skin of their teeth, almost at the death.
What did seem as clear to me as, indeed, it had been all along, was that the weeping and wailing in the Press by supposedly objective commentators to the effect that England now just didn’t possess the players, so that neither Fabio nor anyone else could hope to do much with them, was a fallacy. Yes, there has been a huge influx, even a preponderance, of foreigners into the Premiership, but there are still quite enough native gifted footballers, provided they play to their potential, to give England a more than decent team.
And anyway, how much better is anybody else? Brazil, held at home on the same day England won in Croatia, 0-0, by humble Bolivia, reduced to 10 men! Russia, allegedly now a force, lucky to squeeze through 2-1 in Moscow, against a Wales team which looked barely mediocre the previous Saturday, when I saw it make such a dog’s dinner of beating feeble Azerbaijan, they, too, reduced to 10 men, with a single very late goal in Cardiff. And what of France, beaten 3-1 in Austria; who then proceeded to lose 2-0 in Lithuania? Or supposedly powerful Germany, scraping a 3-3 draw in Finland? How many of these teams could have won 4-1 in Zagreb, against the bruising Croatians?
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