Russia are a defensive young team, England have experience but not enough craft.
Russia have five wins and three draws from eight qualifiers, England have five wins and two draws and a defeat. If Russia draw they stay one point ahead of us.
The key fact is this : Russia have conceded one goal in eight games. One goal ! They’ve won five and drawn three and only conceded one goal.
So it looks as if Guus Huddink is a belt-and-braces coach of a defensive team. Not a team with a great defence. A defensive team who use three at the back in a 3-4-1-2 system that will probably baffle Engerland. And this defensive team can counter-attack three times in a match and slice you open and score.
Mainly, Hiddink has bought confidence to dour footballers who had an inferiority complex. While Russians look up to authoritarian figures, the liberal, tolerant Dutch know how to have a good time and we saw that in the Seventies when they let their long-haired players have wives and girlfriends at two World Cups. Most of their players are outspoken and coaches have to live with that.
Basically, the Dutch punch above their weight in international football while the Russians under-achieve. So Hiddink was hired to loosen them up, let them express themselves a bit, rather than tie up their talents in a tactical straitjacket. He has given them something that no Russian coach could give them.The players didn’t need to be lectured about focus or patriotic fervour. They needed something more subtle, more complex, more indefinable, than that.
Hiddink says, “I think it is good to have some characters that might think differently from everyone else. It makes it spicy for the group. It’s very easy as someone in power to say no to something extra because it may provide you with some problems. But in top football you work on the very edge. It is the same in all sport.”
I don’t know the Russian players, apart from striker Kerzhakov, a sub with Sevilla, who scored the final goal in their 3-0 win over Macedonia last Saturday. But I’ve read that half of them are misfits, mavericks and rebels who might have been cast aside by a strict Russian coach. What they needed was a social worker, not a bully.
So it will be a very interesting contest and I can’t wait to see the best defence in Europe. And maybe their front lads will be too spicy for our defenders.
England are third in Group E and need to win 1-0 but we will probably struggle to score in open play. We might need a set-piece or a penalty.The crowd expect us to bombard them for the first 20 minutes but long balls into the box won’t work against these guys.
The build-up has been excruciating because of the way England micro-manage their news operation. The hacks ask for three players and the FA press girl gives them one. So the hacks sit round a table with a dim lad who has been briefed to say nothing much.That means the manager has to be interesting. And Steve isn’t.
Guus Hiddink is 60 and has coached PSV twice, Real Madrid, Real Betis, Valencia, Holland twice, South Korea and Australia. He learned a lot and has used that knowledge to create a Russian side that might be good enough to do something in Europe 2008.
Obviously, I want England to qualify, even though McClaren is a plank. It’s much better if we qualify because eleven English lads might just do something.
Graham Taylor qualified in 1992 but he didn’t have the imagination or bottle to take Ince and Wrighty to Sweden.
Even Kevin Keegan qualified in 2002. Taylor didn’t win a game in Sweden and Keegan only won one by 1-0.
We saw Atonement last night and it was really rather good.
I love tempestousness in a country house in 1935 and a bit of WW2. The last scene shows the cliffs of Sussex and Jan whispered, “That’s Seven Sisters, that’s where we went in January.” And I remembered : the camera was where we should have been. But we missed the turning, so we went for a long, cold walk on the windswept shore but we didn’t see the fabulous view of the white chalk cliffs that you see in the film.