By Myles Palmer
I have been worrying about England before every game since Sir Alf Ramsey was sacked in 1973.
Like everyone else, I have come to view the England job as one where brave men are tortured.
Each masochist, thinking he is smarter than his predecessors, volunteers to be placed in the crucible. He is subjected to fierce heat, deafening noise, G-forces, like an astronaut.
He has tele-laser beams splitting him apart atom by atom. His hair disintegrates first : it goes grey, then white.
Don Revie was probably the worst England manager, and Ron Greenwood was not much better until he brought Don Howe in to give the team some tactical discipline.
After 1982, when Bobby Robson was manager, I used to preview England’s games for The Scotsman.
I used to talk to him after matches, after the press conferences had finished, and I liked him because he is passionate, honest, knowledgeable and funny.
But Bobby did not know how to pick an England team to save his life, so I worried about him all the time, especially as he blundered through two World Cups.
Then the FA hired an officious windbag, Graham Taylor, who had never played with good players, and that showed. Euro 92 in Sweden was a flop, a national embarrassment.As Lineker said, Graham looked round the dressing room and saw too many millionaires.
Terry Venables, the artful dodger, was too crafty as a coach, always suspicious, always changing his team,
tinkering to make sure he was not outsmarted, so he drew most of his games. Tel’s England were usually too good to lose but not good enough to win.
Euro 96 was there for the taking but in the semi Gascoigne was too pooped to tap in from one yard against Germany. Were we surprised that a team coached by a nightclub owner lacked fitness?
I worried about Glenn Hoddle because he was too young and had not yet worked out the disappointments of his own playing career. His attitude to Owen and Beckham should have been more supportive and if he was going to dump Gascoigne he should not have done it on the eve of France 98.
Kevin Keegan, the new saviour, should have been a caretaker for four games but was stupidly press-ganged into the job.
A promising team was soon Kevinised. We had seen internationals and B-internationals and Under-21 internationals but the next nine games became K-internationals. Engerland had become a new game-show, a new farce.
Those play-off games against Scotland seem like decades ago but were actually in November 1999, when England won 2-0 at Hampden but then lost 1-0 at Wembley.
International football is all about keeping possession but Michael Owen lost the ball 14 times in 63 minutes at Wembley and seemed to be going for Ian Wright’s record against Romania, when Wright lost it 16 times in 73 minutes.But Wright’s record will never be beaten now. It will stand for all time because Owen was subbed that day.
Basically, the Manchester United players had worked with a very good manager, and the Arsenal players had worked with two very good managers, so they knew that Mighty Mouse was out of his depth. He was not believable.
In the second leg of the play-off he told them : “Forget you are 2-0 up ! Go and win this game !” Unfortunately, the players were scared to make a forward run in case the Scots broke and scored.
Shearer, far too slow by then, contributed nothing except an elbow across Neil Sullivan’s throat, Don Hutchinson scored the only goal, and England hung on. Keegan had failed to do the one thing he was supposed to be good at : winding his players up to play attacking football.
Sky Sports pundit Charlie Nicholas said, ” I would be concerned for England because I don’t think England are a team at all.” Graeme Souness said, of Keegan, “I don’t think he’ll sleep very much tonight.” Even Ray Wilkins admitted, “We’ve been played off the park.”
But Keegan had scraped into Euro 2000 and went on TV to say, “Don’t write us off !” In the previous 30 years the manager had always waited till he had lost the first tournament match before saying that.
Keegan should have taken off his Three Lions tracksuit top and handed it to Craig Brown and said, “You take them to Holland and Belgium. I’m clueless.”
But now, 23 months after that bizarre evening of losing and winning, the man in charge is a Swede who knows what he is doing.
Sven-Goran Eriksson and his assistant Tord Grip have given us six straight qualifying victories and taken away the pain, the worry, the neurosis.
Previously, like everyone else, I sweated through the slow dribble of injury news from the England camp : X did not train today, he has had a scan, treatment for his ankle, knee,calf, back, thigh.We will see how he is tomorrow.
And, even now, we still hear the question that has nagged and nagged down the decades : Which two should play up front?
But nowadays I find that I never worry about that stuff. Everything has changed because the manager is intelligent, competent, someone we can trust, so I leave it to Sven.
Greece’s German manager Otto Rehhagel summed it up on Thursday when he said, “From the beginning of Eriksson’s time in charge, the English team is much better.”
Of course I still have my tactical theories (about split strikers), still have my favourite players ( Fowler and Gerrard), still make predictions (Scholes to score ), but I feel as if I have been released from a lifetime of stress.
I can think about other issues, go and interview a country singer, walk through a windswept autumn park, read Jay McInerney’s new short stories, listen to Miles Davis live in Tokyo in 1975, plough through a long New Yorker article about Osama bin Laden’s career, and do hundred other things that are more enjoyable than worrying about the England team.
Yes, I feel as if I have lost something, but I’m free and you can be free too. Just let go and allow that anxiety to float away on the breeze towards Torsby, the tiny forest village where Mr and Mrs Eriksson’s lad got his first pair of football boots.
5th October 2001.