STEVE McClaren is not one of us.
The Englishman with the Scottish name is a man from neither nation. He is an alien who went back to his laptop and contacted his masters in a distant galaxy. He sent this message : “Mission accomplished. I’ve made England look even worse than they were on Graham Taylor’s stupidest night. Our first shot on target was Rooney from 30 yards in the 91st minute”
What should we do with last night’s 2-0 fiasco in Croatia?
First, recognise it as the classic moment in our sporting history. Treasure it and remember how easily it could have been 4-0.
Glenn Hoddle achieved a similar landmark in Stockholm in 1998, just after publication of the World Cup diary which lost the dressing room. That 2-1 defeat was the first time I had ever seen an England performance in which not one player played well. It was amazingly bad, even after Shearer scored in two minutes. I never thought I would see an England team where no player played well. Stockholm ’98 that was a landmark that I didn’t think could be equalled.
But now, only eight years later, Steve McProZone has topped it.
INCREDIBLE !!!!
After ten minutes you could see we would not win. Nothing worked because our players were baffled, bemused, frozen, paralysed. Nobody knew what they were doing. It was a pig’s breakfast, a fiasco, a carnival of incompetence.
One striker pulled John Terry into the left back position and crossed to the near post where Niko Kranjcar’s volley was saved by Paul Robinson.
A nippy striker was beating a big centreback in a wide position where an agile, quick-turning full back should be tackling him or blocking that cross.
Out wide, Terry is a fish up a tree, and Rio Ferdinand got booked on the right when he allowed his man to read his sloppy turn and get ahead of him with the ball.
Other teams, like Macedonia, have a shape and work for each other and pass to each other. But England don’t.
Steve McClaren was fifth choice as England coach and this farce proved he should not have been 35th choice. He is clueless. He had a team with a back four that had not conceded a goal in six games and he decided to get clever and it failed totally.He over-thinks it and over-coaches. He is a deeply misguided technocrat who sits down with all the data and over-analyses it and over-thinks it and gets lost in it.
Before the game, on Sky, McClaren was asked: Why 3-5-2 ?
He said, “We’re not moving the ball from back to front as well as we’d like.”
McClaren is even more scripted than Graham Taylor.He talks from his memorised script, not his heart. Each interview is a multiple-choice test and he is just a hard-working schoolboy who ticks all the right boxes.
He could see it wasn’t working after 20 minutes.But he didn’t have the balls to own up by changing it at half-time when the score was 0-0. Like Sven, he cannot think on his feet. By going 3-5-2 he proved he is an idiot. By not changing it he proved he is a coward as well.
When Eduardo scored with a looping header in 60, he should have changed to a back four and put another striker on. But he waited till it was 2-0, an own-goal by Gary Neville when his backpass bobbled over the foot of Robinson, who should have watched the ball onto his foot. Then he put on Defoe, Richardson and SWP for Crouch, Carragher and Parker in 72
England’s only chance had arrived via Route 1 in 54 minutes. Robinson’s 60-yard kick was flicked on by Crouch to Rooney, who zoomed into the box and fired a thunderous shot a foot over the bar.
Let’s face it, Zagreb was self-defeating folly on a grand scale. It was suicide. And, unlike many other suicides, it was predictable.You could see it coming.
Last Friday morning, October 6, I wrote this : Every England manager has a moment where he tells us : Right, I’m gonna show you that I understand tactics. It’s usually a disaster.
Croatia are now above England on seven points having played a game less. It was England’s heaviest defeat in a qualifying game since Graham Taylor’s team lost 2-0 in Rotterdam in 1993. The next competitive game is five months away in Israel.
What should we do in those five months? Well, the first thing we should do is make sure Zagreb is never forgotten. This moment, this date – 11-10-2006- should be hailed and treasured and handed down to our children and our children’s children.It should become as legendary as Roger Bannister’s four- minute mile and Sir Alf’s glorious victory in 1966.
And let’s be crystal clear about this.All teams lose matches. All teams lose 2-0.All teams lose an away game by 2-0.What was special, what was memorable, what was ( I hope) unrepeatable, was the way this failure was achieved.
If young men ever complain, in 2026, or 2056, about the England team, we should make them watch Croatia 2 ThreeFiveTwo 0.
We should put it out as a DVD with a musical soundtrack. We have plenty of clever songwriters and gifted record producers, so we should commission songs and instrumental music to replace the commentators.
Just erase all of the commentary except the moment, after 86 minutes and 26 seconds, when Martin Tyler hesitated to say the performance was a shambles. Martin knew he had to say it, every instinct told him he had to say it, his decades of experience told him he had to say it, but he was still reluctant.
Martin Tyler said, “It started as an experiment…it’s ending in something of a shambles.”
When Martin says that, you know that Engerland have bottomed out. It can’t get worse.
CROATIA (4-4-2): Pletikosa (Shakhtar Donetsk); Simic (Milan), R Kovac (Juventus), Simunic (Hertha Berlin), Corluka (Dynamo Zagreb); Rapaic (Standard Liege), N Kovac (Salzburg), Modric (Dynamo Zagreb), Kranjcar (Portsmouth); Eduardo da Silva (Dynamo Zagreb), Petric (Basel).
Subs used:Leko (Monaco) for Da Silva, 81; Babic (Bayer Leverkusen) for Kranjcar, 88; Olic (CSKA Moscow) for Rapic, 71.
ENGLAND (3-5-2): Robinson (Tottenham); Ferdinand (Man United), Terry (Chelsea), Carragher (Liverpool); Gary Neville (Man United), Carrick (Man United), Parker (Newcastle), Lampard (Chelsea), A Cole (Chelsea); Rooney (Man United), Crouch (Liverpool).
Subs used:Defoe (Tottenham) for for Parker, 71; Richardson (Man United) for Crouch, 71; Wright-Phillips (Chelsea) for Carragher 71.
Referee: R. Rosetti (Italy).
P.S. In Stockholm in ’98 we also played 3-5-2. The problem then was Hoddle, not the system.The side was : Seaman; Southgate Adams Campbell ; Anderton Redknapp Ince Scholes Le Saux ; Shearer Owen.
All the goals were in the first half : Shearer 2, Anders Andersson 30, Mjalby 32.