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.
So I could only smile when I heard the news : England plan to play 3-5-2 against Macedonia on Saturday.
That will give them five or six players in midfield, and it will be a useful rehearsal for the more testing trip to Croatia next week.
That masterplan, playing 3-5-2 in Croatia, does not make much sense to me.
Croatia have forgotten more about 3-5-2 than Terry Venables and Steve McClaren will ever know.
In Euro ’96 they had the three most skilful midfielders I’ve seen together in a European national team in the last 20 years. None of them could tackle a fish supper but Boban-Prosinecki-Asanovic were geniuses of keep-ball, and they had Jarni as a flying wingback on the left, and Suker, a cool poacher who could chip giant keepers, as Peter Schmeichel found out.
In April 1996 I watched Croatia train at Wembley the night before they played England. Their training routines were very technical and difficult and I realised that England could not have knocked the ball around as sweetly, or rotated as neatly, as they did.
After the session I chatted to their centreback Slaven Bilic near the tunnel. Quite an interesting character, smarter than your average footballer. He said that Alen Boksic could recall playing against Portugal’s Fernando Couto in a youth tournament in Chile when they were both about sixteen or seventeen.Boksic and Couto were still playing for their countries 15 years later.
He once told my pal Joe Bernstein that when he played for his original club – I think it was Hajduk Split- he once flew to New York, saw Guns ‘n’ Roses at Madison Square Garden, and flew back the next day
SLAVEN BILIC is now Croatia’s new coach at the age of 38. He said yesterday that England were rubbish in Germany this summer, so he agrees with me.The difference between us is that I knew Sven’s galacticos would be rubbish.He expected a lot more.
“England were shit at the World Cup,” he says in today’s Sun.. ” They were no good. They were nothing. I have never seen in my life such a great collection of players play as defensively as they did.
“They were so boring. They just didn’t play as a group, they played as individuals. And I really thought they had a great chance to win the World Cup.
“You can look back now and say the team had had a long season, they were under pressure, there were big expectations on them. But they are all just excuses.Look at the Italians. If any team was under pressure, it was them. And all the players from the big nations had had long seasons as well.”
Still, there is some good news.
Sven has gone. And England will never be that bad again. I’m sure of that. I have to believe that.
Rio Ferdinand’s recent comments confirm that Sven was a groupie who tiptoed round his stars and never gave anybody a bollocking. That resulted in the worst England performance of all time, when they lost 4-1 in Belfast. And two World Cups where England did not play well.
THE ENGLAND team is expected to be : Robinson; Gary Neville , Ferdinand, Terry; Wright-Phillips, Gerrard, Carrick, Lampard, Ashley Cole ; Rooney and Crouch.
Has Shaun Wright-Phillips played enough football for Chelsea? No, but he exploded when he came on as sub against Aston Villa last week and after only 15 seconds he blasted a shot against the underside of the bar.
SWP is exciting. He is small and has an intimate relationship with the ball.And he is as brave as three lions.I like Shaun a lot. But this may not be the right role for him, or the right moment.
MANY FANS have been moaning that it’s a boring week, that nothing much is happening at Arsenal, that it’s too long till the next game against Watford.
I’m a football-junkie too but even football-junkies need a few days off.
I’ts a very long season and you have to pace yourself, so I’ve been chilling out, catching up on stuff, going to the gym, re-reading Cat Chaser, an old Elmore Leonard crime novel, and on Tuesday night I enjoyed James Hunter at Bush Hall.
The Watford game will come soon enough.And Arsenal should win by one goal, so I’m not worried about that.
PS. The score in that England-Croatia game in ’96 ? It was 0-0.