Well done, Croatia !
Elimination is a merciful release from watching the ghastly Steve McClaren, who was always a ridiculous appointment.
It’s sad for the fans and bad for the economy but I’m glad we lost 3-2 on Wednesday night. I don’t want to see the incompetence of the FA rewarded.
I can now watch Euro 2008 without angst, knowing Switzerland and Austria will not be invaded by our stupid WAGs and lager louts and tabloid hacks reporting their contemptible behaviour.
Remember, we lost second place to Russia, a really mediocre side. Apart from co-hosts Austria, Russia are the worst of the 16 sides contesting Euro 2008. Mark my words. Russia are rubbish and will do nothing.
Still, Croatia were marvellous and I look forward to seeing how they perform next summer.
We need to play more like they do. We have muscle and bad habits but we need craft and good habits. Peter Beardsley could have played for Croatia, also Gazza, Darren Anderton, Teddy Sheringham, Peter Osgood, Trevor Brooking, Bobby Charlton.
Croatia are craftsmen, team players who can keep the ball and that is what we need. What we have now are selfish stars trying to do their one or two party-tricks, unable and unwilling to play for each other.
Most of the media is parochial. They encourage people to be ignorant about the game, and on BBC1, who should know better, they didn’t talk about what Croatia did, only about what we didn’t do.
When halftime came, and England had been 2-0 down since the 14th minute, Gary Lineker looked like a rabbit caught in headlights. He didn’t know what to say because he’s not a journalist, just a presenter who has reinvented himself as the cheeky chappie from the Walkers crisps commercial. Since the situation was beyond a joke, Lineker could not be a cheeky chappie, so he looked and sounded lost.
Niko Kranjcar hit a dipping shot for the first goal in the 8th minute. It was worth a punt and it paid off.
Wayne Bridge played Olic onside for the second goal, a schoolboy error by the left back and typical of a team who play like schoolboys, as I said in my preview
The Petric 25-yarder was a one-touch-and-bang! strike in 77 minutes which won the match and knocked England out.
Croatian coach Slaven Bilic is an intelligent character with a sense of humour. He plays guitar in a rock band and would be a bit piratical even without that earring.
Bilic is not a phoney, scripted technocrat like McClaren. He is a real person with a personality. He played in the side that came third in France 98, was their Under-21 coach before the 2006 World Cup, and won Group E by beating England in Zagreb and London.
Croatia are an organised team who can improvise within a framework. All players are better in a good team and a good team is always a balanced team, a team with shape. Their teamwork was far superior to our teamwork and they beat us home and away because their passing was better than ours, their movement was better, their shooting was better, and their defending was better, apart from a shaky spell right after Crouch made it 2-2.
As expected, England could not make 4-3-3 work and the system made the players look even worse than they are, even more one-dimensional and selfish than they are. Lampard never got a kick till the penalty, Gerrard was almost as pitiful as Bridge, our worst player, and Barry was just as lost and ineffective as Lampard. Those two never had the ball !
Gerrard had the ball a few times but could not pass to a white shirt. He was shocking. Has an England captain ever had a worse game? When was the last time he played well for England? When we won 5-1 in Munich in 2001 ?
A silly tug by Simunic on Jermain Defoe gave England a lifeline and I knew Lampard would not miss the penalty. He had done nothing all night but I knew he would score and wrote 1-2 in my notebook before he sent the keeper the wrong way.
Our best player Peter Crouch scored a thrilling goal when David Beckham gave us a flash of the dynamism for which he is rightly famous. As Micah Richards won the ball, it broke forward towards Beckham on the right flank and Becks hit the ball first time into a space that Crouch was about to occupy and the striker chested the ball down and smashed in the goal that made it 2-2 and put England on course to survive.
Basically, there are only two problems with the England team.
One is the FA, who are clueless and always will be.
The other is players who play stupidly and lack skills because they haven’t been coached the right way as kids.
Wednesday’s 3-2 defeat by Croatia was a meltdown moment in English football history, worse than Graham Taylor in Oslo, and worse than cheerleader Kevin Keegan’s emotional departure seven years ago after the last game at the old Wembley, but it was no mystery.
With hindsight, Steve McClaren is a No 2 and no more than that. As a No 2 to Jim Smith at Derby County, and to Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, and for five years under Sven, he was there to put on a training sessions while somebody else did the thinking and made the key decisions.
As Middlesbrough manager he was a survivalist like Curbishley, looking for 40 points every season to stay up.He won the Carling Cup and went into the Uefa Cup and usually played 4-5-1 and went behind in almost every quarter and semi but scrambled into the final and played Sevilla and got hammered 4-0.
Off the back of that, Mclaren got the national job and, predictably, turned out to be the worst manager England have ever had.
Most people forget that Middlesbrough players like Jonathan Greening, Massimo Maccarone and Danny Mills were scathing about his lack of man-management skills, and Gareth Southgate said he was “not ready” for the England job.
Maccarone, who left to join Siena in January 2007, said, “Only in England could such a man with such obvious and limited abilities be made into the national coach. The ever-smiling Steve ‘Magnificent’ McClaren is without doubt the most two-faced and false person I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet in football. He should first spend his time actually trying to understand his own players’ mentality instead of wasting so much time trying to understand the British press.”
All his life he wanted to be his own man, all through the Jim Smith years, the Sir Alex Ferguson years, and the Sven years, he wanted to be his own man. But McClaren was never his own man and he ended his bizarre 18-game journey in a way we had never seen before, under an umbrella with a cup of tea. As millions of Englishmen and women raged and cried, gutless Steve did something nobody has ever seen a British manager do when his team was playing a big game. He stood there under his umbrella looking detached. Bilic wore a woolly hat that got wet. Most managers get soaked if their team is getting soaked, it’s part of the job.
What we saw when Croatia beat England 3-2 at Wembley was (1) a team who can play football beating a team who can’t play football and (2) a gutless manager who produced a side that was as scared as he is.
On Thursday morning the FA board met at 8.30 am at Soho Square and quickly announced that the contracts of McClaren and Venables had been terminated. Sir Dave Richards said it was the whole FA, not just Brian Barwick, who chose gutless Steve. (Do we know what Richards did to deserve his K ?)
On Friday they are on a plane to South Africa for the World Cup draw. They say they are no hurry to appoint a new coach but that is a lie because the FA’s biggest fear is nudity. Every day they are without a manager they feel naked. That’s why they rush into the wrong appointment so often.
The man who knows what’s wrong with English football is Trevor Brooking. He’s not the man to fix it but Brooking can say what has to be done and Brooking should be on that plane with McClaren’s ticket. If they need a caretaker, Brooking would be OK.
My pal Hugh Southon spoke to Harry Redknapp on Thursday morning and asked if he would take the job if it was offered.
Harry said he would. Let’s face it, there are very few English managers apart from Steve Coppell and he wouldn’t touch the England job with a bargepole. Martin O’Neill is too canny to do more than flirt with a big job and wouldn’t be any good anyway.
As I said when Sven was sacked, the next England coach should be somebody who has managed internationally before – and it has to be somebody who is not scared of the players or the media. His contract should contain a clause that says he must never play Lampard and Gerrard together and another clause saying he must always play with a half-striker.
One other thing : Let’s hear no more xenophobic drivel about quotas on foreign players. Without foreigners, the Premier League would be pub football and the global TV audience would be nil.