Larky, frivolous, quotable – who is this guy?
Can this really be Sven-Goran Eriksson ?
Last week I said Sven was demob-happy, but he has been hiding it cleverly.
Now he is not hiding it. He sees no point in hiding it.He has relaxed.He has said he doesn’t care about playing good football, only about winning. He has changed.He has unravelled.He has loosened up. He is thrusting it in our faces. He is saying : I’m rich, I’m leaving, I’m ecstatic.
The tone of his press conferences, his facial language, is completely different to anything we have seen in the last five and a half years.
For England, the 2006 World Cup was always about two matches.
That is all I want to say this morning. It was always about two matches. It was always about the quarter-final and the semi-final. If all that hype about “winning the World Cup” was to make any sense at all, Engerland in Germany was about two matches.
Now the first of those matches is here and Sven is suddenly, unexpectedly, as benign as the bride’s father on wedding day, as jolly as a drunken sailor, as euphoric as a schoolboy on the last day of term.
Alice Cooper was rocking happily in 1972 when he screamed “School’s out for summer!” and Eriksson, who has earned about £25 million since he became England coach, is also rocking happily 34 years later.
Sven is counting the hours before his release from his tabloid vale of tears.
I don’t think he will win the World Cup, I never have done, and if he does win it I’ll give up talking about football as well as writing about it.
YES, PORTUGAL will miss Deco more than we miss Michael Owen. But they will not miss Costinha so much as he, has had a bad season in Moscow, where he fell out with his coach. He has no club at the moment and has been playing like a man with no club. Costinha is 31 and not the rottweiler he once was.Big Phil favours Maniche-Costinha-Deco because that was the Porto midfield when Porto won everything.
BIG PHIL would drop Frank Lampard. Me too. My central midfield pair would be Carrick-Hargreaves, with Gerrard on the left.
Don’t be too amazed if the new, larky Sven goes 4-4-2.
WonderWayne is wasted in a 4-5-1 and England will be happier with Crouch and Rooney.If Crouch is a sub he could have a major impact on a very tight game.
Against Deco, a player who would walk into any team here, including Brazil, we might have needed five in midfield. But you can’t play Rooney on his own against Carvaldo and Meira, two tough, mobile boys who will kick him.
I’m NOT gonna write a preview about who will mark who, as that did not work on Friday. Jose Pekerman surprised everybody by copying Klinsmann’s 4-4-2 formation and creating a game where the teams cancelled each other out and few chances were created and it was 1-1 after two hours of football.
My Germany preview was irrelevant.But my preview DID show that Pekerman was worrried about exactly the same things I was worried about,
BIG PHIL SCOLARI is the best tournament coach now working.
Over a campaign, a season, Guus Hiddink might be as good, but if Big Phil was coaching Australia, and Italy had used all their subs, and he had used none of his subs, he would have gone for it, rather than waiting to use them in extra time and giving the jammy Italians the chance for a penalty dive four seconds from the end of normal time. Big Phil might have lost that game but he would nevr have lost it to a Totti penalty that was the last kick of the match
WATCH the technical areas today.
Big Phil will be kicking every ball, Sven will be sitting on his hands, and Steve McClaren will be thinking, “How soon can I get Shearer on board to prop me up?”