By Myles Palmer
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WALES WERE FEEBLE without Savage, torpedoed by two changes.
Defender Andy Melville was injured in the warm-up, Delaney switched to centreback, Koumas came into midfield, and Simon Davies switched to right back, where he was wasted.
Early goal in 4 minutes, they never recovered.
Hartson treated the ball as if it was radiocative, laying it off every time to England players, never accepting the responsibility, never bringing it down and holding it and trying to play people in.
He couldn’t play Davies in because Davies was 60 yards away.
Wales look out of the World Cup already and demoralised that Mark Hughes has left them to manage Blackburn.
A walkover for England, who won 2-0 with a Lampard shot deflected off Owen’s heel and a Beckham goal 72 minutes later.
BECKHAM was pedestrian, pitiful and comical, but scored a fantastic goal in 76.
He was on the left after taking a corner there, and after Wales repelled the bombardment twice, Butt slipped him a two yard pass, knowing he could score from there, and Tattooneck curved a 25-yarder into the postage stamp, six inches from the top corner of a 24-foot wide goal.
Becks dived and tumbled like a circus clown and made two idiotic challenges on Ben Thatcher and collected a hairline rib fracture which could keep him out for a month.
The 4-3-3 system did not work, but England won anyway.
The three striker system wasted Defoe, who hardly got a kick and was replaced by Alan Smith, who was constructive.
Smith passed to another white shirt in the box, which was revolutionary – Owen and Defoe had not done that all game !
Owen is so laborious, always wanting seven or eight touches.
He was beating three men and losing it to the fourth because he didn’t see the defender coming, and he was shooting against legs, like every useless striker you have ever seen.
AFTER THE GAME, Rooney said he found it much harder, playing behind two strikers.
Having said that, Rooney was awesome in a deeper role, showing that he could be our Zidane, our Cruyff, a goalscoring playmaker.
And Rooney is more compact than Zidane, who is a big man with a magical touch, a genius whose creativity is more elaborate and deliberate.
Wayne Rooney is like the Ian Botham of football.
He can bowl teams out, score centuries, hold slip catches.
When Roo plays for ManU, one thing he does brilliantly is surge forward with the ball on his right foot and switch it sweetly and firmly across to the right flank, right into the stride of Cristiano Ronaldo.
Rooney can give that pass to Shaun Wright-Phillips for England.
WILL SVEN PLAY 4-3-3 in Azerbaijan on Wednesday?
No, he will revert to 4-4-2 with SWP on the right and Hargreaves on the left.
Sven had his strict pecking order, his icons, his pathological respect for experience, and that is working for him at the moment.
If he had any balls, he would do what a good gardener does.
He would take some secateurs and go snip, snip.
He would snip Owen in 2004, snip Beckham in 2005, and see Engerland blossom into a solid, creative team in 2006.
The back five is our best since 1990, when Shilton was well over the hill but protected by Des Walker, Parker, Butcher, Pearce and Mark Wright.
But Sven won’t do that, so he will give us what every England manager gives us : respectable failure.
MY FORMER FLATMATE John Mair came over to watch the game and brought his 12-year old son Rob, a footballer who is really, really, really into football and calls the fouls and mistakes as well as Andy Gray.
Amazed when Rob told me the entire French X1 for the evening game against the Irish.
When Rooney played a short pass while running, jabbed forward ten yards into the box with the outside of his right foot, Rob said, “I did that pass last week. I did it in training as well.”
JOHN LENT ME The King, the Denis Law autobiography, which he says is riddled with mistakes, starting with the spelling of the school Law attended.
He showed me the captions of two photos.
One caption says : The great John Charles and I tussle for possession at Hampden Park in 1959.
The photo below is captioned : Same match, but this time foiled by the man Gordon Banks.
The photo shows Banks, Law, Nobby Stiles and Bobby Moore.
Published by Bantam Press, edited by Daniel Balado.
FRANCE V IRELAND was a better contest than the England game.
If Israel could get a 0-0 draw in Paris, so could the Republic, cheered on by 30,000 of their joyful fans.
Cisse does not gell with Henry any more than Owen blends with Defoe, but Pires had a super shot well saved by Shay Given, and when O’Shea missed the best chance of the match, France upped the tempo, as a team full of athletes should, but the Irish defended very well, with Duff having stormer as an auxiliary left back, marking clubmate Gallas.
Duff is finding his true form gradually.
If Duff can stay fit, he should be one of the best players in the Premiership this season, as he was for six months last year.
Thierry Henry has only scored once in his last 11 games for France.
Should France play like Arsenal, without a centre forward, with Giuly in the Freddie role ?
Henry does not need Cisse, and he probably does not need Anelka.
He needs Rooney.
But I can’t get into all that now.
It would take too long – and this piece is already far too long.
October 10th 2004.