By Myles Palmer
At the moment David Beckham is very important, so England pretty much have to play 4-4-2.
But if Kieron Dyer is as good as Sven thinks he is, England could go 4-5-1 after this World Cup.
He could turn them into a white Senegal : fast-breaking full-backs and a swarm of fierce athletes in midfield supporting a lone striker.
If Sven had five aggressively energetic and skilful guys in their mid-twenties, they could outplay everybody by having nine defenders and six or seven attackers : total football from Gerrard, Dyer, Hargreaves,maybe Joe Cole or David Dunn, maybe Scholes.
We don’t know whether Sven is a great tactician yet. I suspect not.
One England manager claimed to be a great tactician.
Venables was futuristic in Euro 96, but also very old-fashioned.
He was futuristic in having five in midfield. It was, you will remember,radical to play Gazza, Macca and Dazza together- three dribblers.
I thought : the Three Lions will need three balls !
The midfield was Ince, Gascoigne, McManaman and Anderton, all of whom ran with the ball, plus Sheringham, who came deep.
It was old-fashioned because Tel was a nightclub owner who never used a fitness coach.
As his mentor Malcolm Allison noted,that was Tel’s blind spot.
A slow crafty player himself,Tel liked slow, crafty players, like Mike Flanagan at Palace in his much-hyped Team of the Eighties.They fizzled out and under-achieved, like Tel’s Engerland.
Gazza played most of career five or six kilos overtweight.
So when the moment came to tap in from one yard against Germany, to take us to the final, where we would have beaten Czech Republic, Gazza missed the ball one yard from an open goal.
He was too fat,too slow, too much of a boozer-and it all caught up with him at that moment.
If he had been fit he would have scored and England would have been European Champions.
Gazza was a Seventies throwback, with a Nineties hype behind him.
It’s a wonder that combination did not kill him.
Today’s main man, Beckham,is a different beast. A superfit hero who absorbs adulation and fame like a baby or a puppy absorbs love.
You can’t give him too much. He thrives on it, grins, wags his tail.
He’s a a big-hearted guy. In a famous documentary he was in the car with Posh, being driven to a book-signing promotion in Essex, she says she’s sick of him being called thick.
And Becks grins sheepishly and says, “But I am thick.”
Unusually, Beckham ENJOYS being photographed and filmed. What would bore somebody brighter is OK for him because it fills up the time between football matches.
As does family life.Brooklyn, like all babies, does something new every week, so that’s fun for Becks and his Mrs.
I began to warm to David Beckham when I realised that he is a guy who gets on with life. He thinks: I love Posh, let’s get married and have a baby. And he does it.
I love the decisiveness in that. It’s not vague. It’s not non-committal. It’s : this is my life-direction, so let’s get on with it.
So David Beckham has grown up a lot.And he has grown up a lot since becoming England captain.
He has taken the captaincy and used it to make himself stronger, just as Man United made him stronger and Posh and Brooklyn made him stronger.
He was two thirds of a great player before, nowhere near a wholly great player,like Figo,who is quicker, more two footed and a dribbler.
But Beckham is,in large part, self-made by his own dedication.
He turned himself into a great technician of the cross, the long pass, the free-kick. His game was about end product.
He is a great quarterback, so he suits Sven’s game-plan perfectly, as does Gerrard.
His gifts are not as natural as Gazza’s,but he handles the super-celebrity status so much better.
Last night I had a look on the fb22 archive to see what I wrote about Beckham in the Argentina game four years ago.
What I wrote was a raw, vicious, disappointed, punitive and ridiculously emotional heat-of-the-moment reaction. That’s is one of the problems with the internet, of course.
Beckham has grown up a lot since then. And I’ve grown up a bit too.
Good luck tomorrow,son!
Saturday June 1st 2002.