By Myles Palmer
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IT’S AMAZING how many people watch TV.
I kept meeting people who saw it.
But then I went on holiday and thought that period was over.
Yesterday morning I go round the corner to buy the Sunday Times at 9am.
I’m sure I wont bump into Adam, a TV producer pal, as he buys his Observer about 10.30 am.
But there is Adam and he says, “I saw you on Newsnight.”
“I was nervous, I’m never able to do a broadcast and say what I really want to say. So I say other things.”
“You looked as if you’d been there all your life,” he said, smiling.
That’s rubbish and flattery, of course.
But I found out that I could do TV.
And it was interesting to be on that programme on Monday August 2nd with Matt Lawton (Daily Mail) and Alan Keen (an MP) and talk about Sven and the FA.
BEFORE NEWSNIGHT I was thinking, “What will I say? That Sven is a groupie whose main talents are sucking up to rich presidents of clubs and pampering superstars? That he’s a lorry driver’s son who came out of the deep dark forest of Torsby and discovered that he liked sunshine and the Latin lifestyle and dark-haired, dark-skinned women?”
As you know, the News of the World revealed that communications director Colin Gibson had tried to make a deal with them, keeping Mark Palios’s name out of the Faria story, but giving them chapter and verse on her affair with Sven – dates, restaurants and so on.
Matt Lawton said that Palios had done a decent job, but this naive ploy had backfired spectacularly.
Kirsty Wark’s first question to me was, “Should Sven-Goran Eriksson stay as England manager?”
I said, “Not if they can afford to get rid of him.”
“Why not?”
“Well, he’s a clown. He’s backward, negative. We’ve spent a lot of money to hire a Swede to make us play like Italy played 30 years ago. It’s not what we’re good at.
“The transition from England manager to England manager is always badly handled. They always go at the wrong time.”
And so on.
FIVE MONDAYS LATER, my views on Sven’s competence have not changed.
But I don’t think the press should be allowed to sack him.
They don’t employ him, so they should not sack him.
Clearly, Sven is not the tactician we thought he was.
It takes Gordon Strachan to point out that England need a Pires, roaming inside to create space for Ashley Cole’s overlaps.
150 football journalists have failed to point that out.
The LAST thing we need on the left is a left-footed player !
Years ago, Roberto Carlos played for Inter Milan and they tried him on the left wing in a 4-4-2.
It didn’t work.
Same thing : he needed space to explode into.
Like Ashley, Roberto Carlos loves to gallop into a prairie.
The nearest thing to Pires is McManaman, except that Macca only threatens to do what Pires does.
Pires carries the ball and makes goals and scores goals.
Macca does not make goals or score goals.
Sven realised immediately that Macca was lacksadaisical and would never deliver, so he drummed him out of the England squad.
Sven was 100% right on that.
SADLY, DAVID BECKHAM is not worth his place in the side.
He should not be there.
But Beckham is bombproof.
Sven can’t take him off or drop him because he is the captain.
This from Paul Hayward in today’s Telegraph :
“A coherent shape is the first requirement of a team trying to regain control of a match. The second – often – is an injection of pace. But there will be rosary beads on sale in hell before Eriksson acknowledges his obligation to take off David Beckham, when he’s playing badly, in favour of a quicker, fresher player on the right: in this case, Shaun Wright-Phillips.
Beckham faded again on Saturday but has become untouchable. Behind that inscrutable exterior, Eriksson is a social climber with a deep weakness for celebrity. With Beckham, simply, he is star-struck: a deeply unhealthy starting point for an England manager.”
EXACTLY !
September 6th 2004.