By Myles Palmer
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England 1 Sweden 1
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Argentina 1 Nigeria 0
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Every game we’ve seen so far has been a first game.And first games are often tense and dull.
Only Senegal, Denmark, and Spain have impressed so far.
This game proved that Heskey should NOT play on the left in a 4-3-3.
We all knew that anyway.Martin O’Neill knows it and Gerard Houllier knows it.
But Sven didn’t.He does now.
Did you think Sven’s first World Cup game a terrible, terrible failure of selection and tactics?
Did you think his coaching was as clueless as Graham Taylor’s, as bad as Keegan’s ?
Or should we blame the players?
Sven has won 6 out of his 16 games as England coach. Have
we seen the best of him?
He is on a steep learning curve, as I said yesterday.How much can he learn in the next four days?
The whole of Sven’s life flashed before his eyes during thatappalling, dismal, depressing and boring second half.
Maybe even before Niclas Alexandersson scored after a big
boob by Danny Mills in 59 minutes?
Did he think : What the hell am I doing here, being humiliated by a Swede who can’t get a game for Everton?
David Beckham did not kick the ball once between coming
out for the second half and going off after 63 minutes.
He got some playing time and his corner delivery for Sol
Campbells headed goal was superb.
But Beckham did not have the ball once in those 18 second half minutes.
The first half was a non-event, but we scored.
It was so ne-dimensional it was like watching table football, little footballers on poles and you yank the handles to make them kick the ball.
England were winning 1-0, Sweden looked like a Nationwide Div 2 team, and we should have walked it. But we never got started in the second half. Sweden equalised and it went downhill from there. It was obvious that Sweden would improve after the break. But England should have improved to cope with them. They didn’t.Instead we saw a huge bomb crater, a vast hole in the middle of the pitch with no white shirts in it.Did we have eleven players out there or only seven? Danny Mills tried to chest a hopeful ball into the box, then cleared his own mistake straight to Alexandersson, who stepped to the left and hit a left foot cannonball through Seaman, who got a fingertip to the ball. Seaman had just regained his ground after coming out towards Mills. He had been better sighted Seaman might have tipped the shot over the bar. Scholes and Hargreaves had gone AWOL, Sol reacted too late. Rio was on his heels deep in the penalty area, Mills was almost on the goal-line. A shambles. If Nicky Butt had been playing he would have blocked Alexandersson’s shot. The most worrying fact of the whole debacle was that we created NOTHING in open play over 90 minutes. Michael Owen, one of Sven’s “cultural architects”, had no service. His touch was hopeless and he had only one opportunist shot into the side-netting. We hit so many long balls that Scholes was redundant. How could he do his thing when the ball was flying ove rhis head? If you’re gonna do that, don’t play Scholes. When Scholes did get the ball he made a few passes and we started to look OK. But nothing evolved from that. ENGLAND REGRESSED TEN YEARS IN THE SECOND HALF. It was like Euro 92 with Graham Taylor : arid, barren, sterile,clueless. It’s gotta be 4-4-2 now. Argentina know each other and they know their system inside out. How stubborn is Sven? Stubborn enough to pick the same eleven against Argentina on Friday? He might, but with Vassell on the left and Heskey up front. He has had 16 games to try Owen/Sheringham and if he hasn’t tried that combo in 16 matches he’s not gonna try it now. When things go wrong it’s not just the media and the fans that turn against the manager. The staff do the same. If Man United lose a few games, if Arsenal lose a few, the coaches and staff are just as fickle as the fans and press. They are quick to moan, quick to say that the main man doesn’t know what he is doing. ARGENTINA 1 NIGERIA 0. I got up at six to watch the game. Batistuta is a yard too slow and they still foul strategically in midfield. After 25, the game slowed down in the heat. Coach Bielsa was using Claudio Lopez in the wrong way, so he did nothing. Both teams defended deep, so they had acres of space in midfield. The most interesting thing was when Veron went off and Aimar came on. ARGENTINA play 3-3-1-3 and Veron is the one. If the playmnaker is as lavisghly fgifted and spectacuykar as Veron, it becomes a one-man show. That’s what we saw here. It’s : Give it to Veron and wait to see what he does, and go from there. That’s good if the striker goes wide, and Claudio Lopez makes diagonal runs beyond the defence. But with Batistuta relatively static these days, since he became a pure bombardier, and Ortega dribbling in from the right side,Lopez was totally wasted. Bielsa took him off and Kily Gonzalez, a more conventional winger, looked better. As a tournament evolves, different players become important in a team. The pecking order changes. We will start to see that in a few teams in the next two weeks. Second half, Argentina were annoying. They didn’t attack, they just sparred. Javier Zanetti, one of the world’s finest midfielders, a guy who can dribble and shoot, never crossed the halfway line. Argentina’s tactical discipline is so advanced that they look constipated. After 63, one of Veron’s left wing corners reached Batistuta beyond the far post and he got above teammate Pochettino and got a good contact, heading in beautifully. He is slow these days, but still a bomber. I think Crespo will start against England because he is younger,braver,busier and more skilful. After 77, Aimar came on for Veron and things brightened up. The one-man show stopped, they broke forward more enterprisingly, supporting the play. It became more of an ensemble thing. They played more football and looked good : Ortega to Crespo to Kily : bang! Shorunmu made a good save. As I said, every game so far has been a first game, so we should make allowances. Brazil play Turkey at 10 a.m. Big Phil will be without Emerson, his main man, who dislocated his shoulder in training today and misses the whole World Cup. Emerson, 26, was with Big Phil at Gremio in 1996 before he joined Leverkusen on his way to Roma. Italy have gone 4-4-2 with Doni on the left, a formation which is like the Butt-Hargreaves-Scholes combo I fancied. Trapattoni will NOT be outnumbered in midfield when Italy play Ecuador at 12.30. I’ll miss Italy as I shall be, literally, out to lunch. 2nd June 2002