Foods for English Thought-
ENGLAND TURNS BACK THE HANDS OF TIME:
I'm going to leave this current Argentina performance aside for now (they've been my obvious favorites from the start), and just jump right into that the whole Peter Crouch and England dialogue. More specifically, I'm going to agree that I don't get the fascination with the lanky English striker, either. I haven't seen the instances of finesse-for-a-big-man that wooed Rafa Benitez and Sven Göran-Erikkson. My guess is that they believe that if they can work with the Crouch they can develop him into the mismatch advantage about which all coaches dream.
But what if he's not coachable enough to overcome limited skill? Crouch to me has terrible first-touch control, which is a bad trait to have on the field with an unfit Michael Owen and wasteful Frank Lampard. Crouch is also too frail to really wreak enough havoc with his size since he is continually frustrated into being whistled for penalties by smaller defenders. If you're a big man up front you either have to be strong to send opponents to the ground without showing any effort, so the ref thinks the other guy is falling in search of a whistle, or you need to be resilient enough so that any climbing or poking from defenders just doesn't get in the way of you sticking your head on the ball in a downward fashion towards goal. Crouch can't send guys to the ground without throwing his limbs about in an on-field robot dance, and he isn't bulky or level-headed enough to not let penalty calls against him bother him, most of which are caused by his lack of ease while attempting to muscle opponents. It's a vicious cycle, Peter Crouch's life in the box.
There is another point, too, I guess: Besides Crouch not being good enough to be a singular focus yet, he brings out the worst in both Erickson's conservative tactics and the English game. Having a healthy striking partner up front might allow for changing tactics, but the problem with Peter Crouch other than Crouch himself, or his questionable dancing skills, is that the emphasis on him in attack brings about a regression of the English game back to when the Premier League was called the First Division. Guys like Ian Rush, Terry Butcher, and yes, Mark Hughes, roamed the pitch. English attack, which was largely influenced by domestic league play, didn't so much come down the middle on the ground with skill as it floated in via long aerial balls sent from just about anywhere into the box. Apart from the prettiness that David Beckham can now bring to those crosses, watching the England-Trinidad game was mostly disturbing because it brought up flashbacks to an older style of play that simply won't win the team anything. In fact, it didn't win the team anything when the manner of play was in its heyday some two decades ago. Perhaps most importantly, it also didn't look stylish, which is something that even a David Beckham can't change on or off the field.
And so, if you ask me, what is most frightening about England's displays so far in this year's World Cup is not just that there is no chance they will win the trophy. It's that we are watching a well-equipped generation of players on a team that is reverting to an unsuccessful, boring, passé style of play that doesn't suit them or the skills that they learned growing up. With all the emphasis that has been put on changing the English game in the last decade or longer, now that Sven has a team of players who could execute differently, he has them executing like the domestic league circa 1987. And nobody--fans, players, media, league officials, development coaches--wants to see the old kind of English game played, no matter what the personal nostalgia factor might be for a time when a pasty white man could let his soul glow just as brightly as Billy Dee.
Sure, I'm taking this all a bit overboard, but really, talking about football loses much of its cultural value if you don't stretch things out further than you should, lose a little bit of common sense, head to slightly irrational territories. And so, I'll say it--while there's plenty of time to turn things around, methinks this World Cup could turn out to be a sad step backwards for English football in more ways than in results alone.
~Anuj Desai
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Hirshey: Get It Together, Turniphead
David Hirshey will write regularly during the World Cup.
In his five years at the helm of England’s glamorous underachievers, England coach Sven-Goran Erickson has been called a lot of things — Hey, Turniphead! Screw you, Mr. Magoo! — but there’s one moniker that has yet to be affixed to the bespectacled Swede. No one, so far as I can tell, has ever called him a Tactical Genius.
Not that he hasn’t garnered attention for certain of his sophisticated strategies — play like rubbish for 83 minutes, hit long balls onto the head of a 6-foot-8 mutant giraffe, pray he doesn’t fall over jumping for them, wait for Steven Gerrard to open a can of thunder in stoppage time, promise you will do better next time, take your 5 million pound salary and run - but, by and large, he has never had to rely on his coaching legerdemain to get by. Until now. Despite playing like S****hope United for much of the time, England is in the second round and faces a crafty Ecuadorian side on Sunday in its first true World Cup test. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Erickson has no strikers. That’s like the Yankees heading into the heart of the season with a banged-up Jeter, A-Rod, Giambi and Matsui. Oh wait, that’s kind of like what they’re doing.
Going into the Cup, Erickson gambled on a strike force that was thinner than Victoria Beckham after a high colonic. His two starting frontrunners were the Metatarsal Millionaires, Wayne Rooney and Michael Owen, both of whom were battling back from foot injuries that kept them sidelined for four and two months, respectively. In reserve, he had the pencil-necked skyscraper Peter Crouch and the untested 16-year-old prodigy Theo Walcott. When Owen’s knee buckled in the first minute of yesterday’s game against Sweden, it was difficult to gauge who was in more pain, Owen or Erickson. That forced Crouch to, er, step up. Granted, he already has one goal in this Cup, but for all his height, he still comes up short as a world-class soccer player. As for Walcott, Scotland Yard should issue an Amber-alert for the missing teenager. Honestly, is he even sitting on the bench, or is he just watching TRL in the hotel?
That leaves Rooney, a one-man wrecking crew when he’s fit and happy. Alas, he is neither, as evidenced by his Terrell Owens-like tantrum when Erickson subbed him out yesterday after 69 argy-bargy minutes. Stalking off the field, the 20-year-old former pug laid into the top rail of the dugout before angrily throwing his boots to the ground. Rooney recently signed a multi-book deal for five million pounds, with the first epic allegedly dealing with his World Cup experiences. Working title: Sod Off, You Swedish C***!
So the question begs: What was the Svenmeister thinking when he left off perfectly healthy and useful strikers like Jermaine Defoe and Darren Bent from his World Cup roster? Is it possible that he’s so incredibly naive he figured that a half-fit Owen and Rooney would withstand the physical rigors of a month-long tournament, or that Crouch would suddenly morph into a fox-in-the box and Walcott would provide youthful pace and gusto picking splinters out of his ass? Remember, this is a man who was famously duped by a fake sheikh into spending two days aboard his yacht in Dubai discussing how he would lure David Beckham and other England players to a team the Arab was going to buy for Erickson to coach. Is it any wonder that a slightly less ingenious opponent like Sweden could bamboozle him on simple set-pieces, which England defended like an AYSO team yesterday? I mean, where were Beckham and Lampard when Marcus Allback leapt unfettered to head in a corner kick in the 51st minute? Poring over Ferrari brochures? Contemplating their summer vacations in D’Cap Antibe? How much longer can England really depend on 30-yard speculative strikes from Joe Cole and dramatic wonder goals from Gerrard to escape ignominy?
Hey, Turniphead? Time’s up
