In a rational world, David Beckham would never have come near to 100 caps. He can’t, and hasn’t for a long time, been able to run; surely the essential requisite of a winger.
Let us be thankful for small mercies. At least there was no David Beckham in Berlin. No Beckham to come ludicrously off the substitutes’ bench with a few minutes of an England game remaining, to win yet another cheap cap. And to approach the records of the likes of Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton, who won their international caps fair and square. As, indeed, did the late Billy Wright, first to the century, eventually being capped 105 full game times. While the record holder, Peter Shilton, with 125 caps, would, one hopes, be out of reach even of Beckham, so absurdly and inexplicably supported by Fabio Capello. The supposedly Iron Man with, one might say, this Achilles heel.
Beckham wasn’t present in Berlin, not because he had been definitively dropped, as he should have been so long ago, but because he “wasn’t match fit.” Which, indeed, he hardly looked on several of his recent, fleeting appearances. His hugely paid — or overpaid — season in the obscurity of America’s so called Major League Soccer, with the gullible Los Angeles Galaxy was conspicuous by its mediocrity, in common with the team at large. All that money spent and it didn’t even get to the play-offs.
In a rational world, Beckham would never have come near to 100 caps. True, he has had his jewelled moments for England in the past. True, he is a masterly taker of free-kicks from distance, or closer to the box, an insidious crosser of the ball from the right. But always, you will note, in these static situations. He can’t, and hasn’t for a long time, been able to run; surely the essential requisite of a winger. Add to this the fact that he finds it so hard to beat a man and thus so hard to get to the goal-line as the classical winger can, thus being able to pull the ball back into the goalmouth; arguably the most dangerous pass of the game.
England could be grateful for the fine free-kick goal he scored for them to save their faces and their qualification place in the Euros against a Greek team which, even away from Athens, was deservedly in the lead. That the free-kick should never have been given, after a piece of playacting by Teddy Sheringham, doesn’t obscure the merits of Beckham’s achievement.
Even in the 2006 World Cup, when arguably he should never have been playing at all, his free-kicks brought an important couple of goals. Yet, his pedestrian presence kept out the younger, faster, infinitely more dynamic Aaron Lennon, who brought fresh legs and menace to that wing, when occasionally allowed to appear as substitute.
And then... those penalties! Those awful, mis-hit penalties, missed at crucial moments of important games. He missed one against Turkey in Istanbul, when insisting that he slipped. In the 2004 European Nations Finals, he missed against France. And when, in England’s vital last, as it proved, game against the hosts Portugal in Lisbon, it came down to penalties after extra-time, he hoofed their first spot kick horribly wide. Of course, that was down to the pitch which didn’t, however, seem to have worried several other takers.
Perhaps it would be unfair to go all the way back to that fateful day in the French World Cup of 1998 when, playing against Argentina, Diego Simeone — he has just quit his job as manager of Buenos Aires’ River Plate, Beckham might be interested to know — provoked him into a silly, petulant reaction, when he kicked out at Simeone while lying on the ground, to be promptly sent off. England’s 10 men battled on heroically, all the way through extra-time, only, at the end, to go out on penalties.
England’s hooligan fans, and there were plenty of them, took a long time to forgive him, viciously abusing him, his wife and even his child when he came off the field in a European Championship finals game a couple of years later. But over the years, of course, all has changed abundantly and lucratively for the better, with Beckham the idol, Beckham the pin-up, Beckham the heavily tattooed hero, whose face and sometimes flaunted body can shift almost any kind of commerce.
When the doomed and inept Steve McClaren took over as manager, he was a clear case of what one is tempted to call Beckhamitis, flying all the way, those thousands of miles to the States, in the hope of seeing Beckham play for the Galaxy; only, on one occasion, to find for all that expense, that Beckham wasn’t playing at all.
When Fabio Capello took over, one hoped fervently for better, brighter and more rational things. Alas, we didn’t get them. I’ve known, liked and respected Fabio as player, manager and analyst for some 35 years. As a manager, he built a reputation for being a tough, no-nonsense, disciplinarian. As Beckham found for some time, to his cost, when Capello took over at Real Madrid and dropped him; though he was eventually restored. But some kind of softening seems to have taken place since Fabio has come to England.
The first, alarming signs of it were when he, following in the steps or the air miles of McClaren, sent his assistant thousands of miles across the Atlantic to see Beckham play in a mere friendly. He was duly restored to the team, to the exclusion of a bunch of bright young wingers, immensely more capable of doing the job than he. But this season Capello, over Beckham, has surely plumbed the depths making one ask, in an old English way, whether Beckham knows where the body is buried?
For time and again, though Capello doesn’t “start” Beckham, he has brought him on very late and quite superfluously, in the final minutes of a match, thus, under present, permissive, circumstances, guaranteeing him an international cap each time. On his last, minuscule appearance, in Minsk, versus Belarus, he came on just two minutes short of the 90 minutes! His last four shows for England have endured less than half an hour, all told. Fiasco.
Now he is to spend time with Milan, where he is welcomed — but why? — by the famed Ronaldinho. And England’s flying right winger, young Theo Walcott, says Becks is good for morale. Can they see something I can’t? I do wonder.
Comments
SHARE