By Myles Palmer
Germany have a mediocre team and a fantastic keeper in Oliver Kahn.
I think the Germans will play for a 0-0 draw and lose 1-0.
Sven-Goran Eriksson knows he has better players than Rudi Voller,so history and home advantage mean nothing on this particular occasion.
Seaman is too old, Ashley Cole is too young,and Beckham may be only 90% fit, but I still fancy England strongly on Saturday.If we had Kahn we would beat them 2-0.
Gerrard, Owen and Heskey will terrify them, and they will be worried about Scholes scoring.
So they will sit back and pack midfield in the first half. Like Bayern, they will probably play crab-football for most of the game and wait for set-pieces.
Without Scholl they are predictable. Right winger Deisler is a good player, but not yet a world beater. He might find he is spending a lot of time tracking Ashley Cole’s runs down the left wing.
Eriksson is a far, far more experienced as a coach than Rudi Voller, whom he signed as a player for Roma from Werder Bremen in 1987. The two never worked together because the Swede joined Fiorentina before Voller arrived.
The German players hated Erich Ribbeck, the previous coach, so they were shambles at Euro 96.
Voller and his No 2. Michael Skibbe, the tactical brains of the coaching team, have now turned it round, big time.The players like Rudi and that makes big difference.
As always the Germans should be a solid, efficient unit and hard to beat. But I just think that the shape of the game will be dictated not by Deisler and Ballack, but by Owen, Heskey and Gerrard.
They will try to stifle Gerrard, try to prevent his passes, which can rip their defence to shreds, as we saw in the Super Cup when his cute, early, left-footed pass released Michael Owen to lay on that first goal for Riise.
Kahn definitely bottled the challenge with Heskey for the second goal in that match.
If it had been a Champions League game, or a World Cup game, he would have come off his line a LOT sooner when Heskey burst between the two centrebacks.
But Kahn is a very smart man as well as a brave one. He was in danger of getting a kick in the teeth, or a broken finger, if he went in for a 50-50 with the awesomely strong Heskey, so the keeper wisely decided to get there second.
Bayern were annoyed enough, after going 3-0 down in Monaco, to pull two goals back. They never like losing. But, in the larger scheme of things,the Super Cup was not a big game in the way that Saturdays’ encounter is a big game.
There is one important point I keep forgetting to mention in my Sven pieces.
I think he can suss out the mentality and mood of foreign teams much better than Robson,Taylor, Venables, Hoddle or Keegan.
Sven-Goran Eriksson is a shrewd and much-travelled cosmopolitan character who can, I hope, read the German camp and the German mood and make small but crucial adjustments to his game-plan accordingly. Things like that can make the difference between losing a tight game and winning it.
Don’t know if I will get time to do a detailed preview later in the week.
29th August 2001.