The global scene

AP

There had been weeks of trouble in the German camp, after the veteran, much capped, midfielder, Torsten Frings, dropped by manager Joachim Low from the team, had publicly and furiously reacted.

A spate of recent friendlies, that now widely despised and phenomenon among English club managers, nevertheless gives us some useful information about how international matters stand. So far as Fabio Capello is concerned, that richly merited 2-1 win in Berlin, whose margin flattered such a mediocre German side, might well have led to an embarrassment of riches.

Above all, it simply and surely complicates the everlasting problem of the dualism between Frank Lampard and Steve Gerrard. Neither of them played and you might uncharitably say that neither of them was remotely missed. Last time out in Minsk, Capello had frankly ducked the issue of duplication by using Lampard in the centre of midfield, while putting Steven Gerrard out on the left — on his wrong foot in a role which he has never favoured — palliating the prospect by enabling him to hold a kind of roving commission, thus enabling him to move into central territory. This he did early on with supreme success, scoring a spectacular right-footed goal to put England in the lead.

Subsequently, however, his constant incursions into the middle left significant gaps on the left which a more adventurous full-back than Belarus’ would surely have exploited. Not to mention the fact that, since Gerrard is no left-winger, the activity and the crosses which might have come from one, and which so significantly did from Stewart Downing in Berlin, were not to be seen.

Three risky, in prospect, experiments by Capello, two of which worked, surely to a degree which even he could not expect, one of which was almost a disaster. Downing was picked on the left, despite feeble displays on previous occasions. Matthew Upson kept his place in central-defence, despite such poor performances in the previous two internationals, against Kazakhstan and Belarus. There were all sorts of other possibilities in central-defence for Capello, even if Rio Ferdinand was crocked. Phil Jagielka for example, recently eulogised by his manager at Everton David Moyes, has moved back with great success from midfield. The Spurs pair Jonathan Woodgate and Ledley King — King, admittedly, always prone to injury — were not in the squad. In it instead was the promising but largely unknown, at least at this level, Mancienne, a Chelsea player on loan, a division down, with Wolves. But Upson, exploiting a pitiful error by the new German ’keeper, Adler, to score the game’s first goal, went from strength to strength.

But bringing the fearfully fallible Scott Carson on as a substitute in goal at half-time seemed to be a question of dicing with death, and so it all too quickly proved. Carson, you may recall, gave away a horribly embarrassing and crucially important goal at Wembley against Croatia last season. He wasn’t even in the original England squad for Berlin. David Jones, to put it wildly, is not the most predictable of goalkeepers. Yet it would surely have been sensible to keep him on. In the event Carson came too far out of his goal, confusing John Terry — who nobly afterwards took the blame — enabling to knock the ball embarrassingly through his legs and follow it up into the net. True England’s opening goal had been just as much of a farce but after that, England had dominated play against a German team with no real shape or coherence.

There had, of course, been weeks of trouble in the camp, after the veteran, much capped, midfielder, Torsten Frings, dropped by manager Joachim Low from the team, had publicly and furiously reacted. He was supported by the team’s skipper, Michael Ballack, absent in Berlin, who was reproached and ordered to come to explain himself by Low, and fiercely criticised by the former skipper of Germany, Lothar Matthaeus; hardly himself a stranger to controversy. In the event, Ballack did, indeed, apologise, but damage to the team’s morale and to Low’s prestige seems to have been done.

Hard to understand, meanwhile, why Low should have chosen the centre-back for the surprising Hoffenheim, Compper, manifestly out of position at left-back, where a resuscitated Shaun Wright Phillips, a new man since his return to Manchester City, ran him ragged. The loss of Theo Walcott, with that wretched shoulder injury in Berlin training, has been a colossal blow to Arsenal, though a lesser one for England since, at the moment, there is an absolute abundance of good right-wingers. Obviating, surely, the need to bring back the ineffable David Beckham for a few futile minutes at the end of each game, thus giving him each time an unearned international cap. This time, Capello told us that Beckham wasn’t match fit; though Milan, for reasons best known to themselves, and to the surprising applause of Ronaldinho, are going to take him to San Siro for a few weeks.

But, apart from Wright Phillips, Spurs have two excellent right-wingers, neither of whom figured in Capello’s squad. He seems to have an aversion to picking the talented David Bentley, while Aaron Lennon under the aegis of Harry Redknapp, is showing the electric form which made him such an improvement on the static Beckham, on the few occasions when he was allowed to replace him.

Of South American teams, Brazil improved with a spanning 6-2 win over Portugal in Brasilia with three goals for their striker, Luis Fabiano. Quite a bright change from all those recent dour, packed midfield, days, enacted by coach Dunga. Diego Maradona’s first game in charge of Argentina, and given his contentious nature, you do wonder how many more there will be, resulted in a 1-0 win in Glasgow, the goal scored by that splendid right-winger with the potent shot, Maxi Rodrigues, just as he had recently and forcefully scored at Anfield versus Liverpool, for Atletico Madrid. Maradona has insisted on having as his right-hand man, the former, bruising Argentine centre-back, Oscar Ruggeri, rather than the amiable 1986 winning centre-back and scorer of a headed World Cup final goal Jose Luis Brown.

At Hampden Park, Lionel Messi, by agreement with the Argentine Federation, with Barcelona, was absent; star of almost any show. So was Maradona’s own son-in-law, Aguero, concerned about his wife and therefore back to Spain.