Two feet: that’s what finished England. Had Scott Carson been standing two feet to his left when Mladen Petrić tried that impertinent 25-yard shot, he would have stopped it, and England would almost certainly have held on for the draw that would have taken them to the European Championship. It wouldn’t have been a strange or tactically unsound or improbable decision from Carson; he simply would have had to hedge his bets, as Croatia advanced the ball, by moving in slightly to protect the goalmouth, rather than committing, as he did, to the near post. It might have been eighteen inches. As bumbling as England looked, as inadequately as they understood their scheme, as depleted as they were by injury, they were one medium-sized goalkeeper’s step to the left from getting through. Croatia, a team filled with players from Serie A, the Premier League, and the Bundesliga, playing at their absolute best, with no injuries, no pressure, and an impeccable gameplan, caught England on the night of their worst performance in living memory and England came two feet away from holding them to a draw.
I would like to suggest, with all possible gentleness, that it might be going a bit too far on the evidence to say that Croatia were “far superior in technical ability, skill and commitment to the insipid and inept England team”, or to call the English players “over-paid, over-pampered, and over-hyped English prima donnas” who “disgraced the England shirt”. A bit too far for anyone; but particularly for an elected official, and even more particularly for an elected official expressing these sentiments in a motion submitted before Parliament. For someone like that, these comments might look like the cheapest sort of rabble-rousing, but that didn’t stop Roger Godsiff, MP for Birmingham Sparkbrook and Small Heath, who introduced his early-day motion castigating the England team and praising Croatia and Russia the morning after England failed to qualify.
Welcome to England, where the middle ground between being a hero and being a disgrace is a stretch of precisely two feet. In the four days since the Croatia match, I have read countless stories about “spineless, pathetic, rubbish England”, the “joke of Europe” (the Sun); about past failures being “sluiced down the archives of history last night by a humiliation so abject that it defies reason, let alone excuse” (the Daily Mail); about “the end of the dream…the end of England as a genuine world force” (the Mirror). I have heard Premier League fans boo every touch of the ball by an England player, unless of course he happened to play for their club. I have seen television analysts furiously blame a loss inflicted on men in their 20s and 30s on the laziness of children under 10. I have read not one but two arguments, both by normally sensible writers, stipulating that the Premier League should be torn off from the FA, that Premier League players should be barred from the England team, and that the England team would be better off if it were made up entirely of lower-league footballers.
England looked terrible on Wednesday night. I’m not pretending otherwise. But what makes this deluge of shame and hostility so hard to take is that none of it would be happening if Scott Carson had slid two feet to his left in the moment before Petrić shot. Had he done so, we’d be hearing only about the greatness of David Beckham, the dauntlessness of Peter Crouch, and the “fighting spirit” that England displayed in clawing back from a two-goal deficit. Everyone would be eagerly assessing England’s chances in Euro 2008. They’ll have to improve on that first half, everyone would say, and McClaren may still be a muppet, but with Rooney and Owen back, and the defenders healthy, and a fit David Beckham, who knows…
I would like to suggest, with the delicacy of a single feather falling on a perfectly still lake, that commentary surrounding the England football team has lapsed into a state of permanent overreaction. Whatever happens, good or bad, with the team, the ensuing discussion not only quickly becomes exaggerated, but begins in a state of exaggeration, as though the tabloid culture has held sway for so long that it’s taught everyone to skip all the steps between calm assessment and screaming simplified frenzy. And this happens so automatically, and is so universally taken for granted, that England games seem less like football matches these days than like occasions for the nation to release its pent-up feelings. And watching from abroad, you start to wonder whether anyone remembers that those intermediate steps exist.
One of the hallmarks of the culture of permanent overreaction is that it erases the distinction between athletics and morality. Success is taken for virtue, failure is treated as a sign of decadence and corruption. It’s never simply that the other players were better on the day. When England do well, it’s because of some strength in the national self-image (fortitude, tenacity, et. al.) which they have been able to express; when they fail, it is always, always, because they’re pampered and overpaid. Being overpaid opens, in critiques of the players, onto all sorts of concrete vices (they’re spoiled, they’re soft, they’re selfish, not like the players of yesterday), but the relentless focus on the size of their salaries seldom makes anyone wonder about the depths of class resentment that the fans seem to hold in reserve for players whom they’re simultaneously desperate to idolize. And it seldom makes anyone ask whether there’s actually a measurable correlation between the players’ income and the national team’s success. In fact, the Italian team that won the World Cup was not exactly made up of paupers. And failure sometimes has more to do with injury and a faulty gameplan than it does with the greed that festers in the depths of a player’s soul.
England were woeful on Wednesday night; I’ve written as much, and I know it. But they were woeful for a few specific reasons, not because of some all-consuming rot that’s ruined the English game. Their manager was not up to the task, consistently bungled player selection and tactics, made some of his worst gaffes against Croatia, and has been fired. Fully half their first-team players were injured, and will heal. And even accounting for those weaknesses, the performance England turned in was far below their usual level; it was an aberration, not a norm. And even under these aberrant conditions, the team were almost good enough to succeed.
I would like to suggest, with the lightness of one snowflake landing faintly on a field, that the culture of permanent overreaction, through the distorting effect that it has on the fans’ relationship with the players and on the players’ sense of their jobs, is as much to blame as anything for England’s recent underperformance. And if that’s true, it means that the current slash-and-burn approach to determining the next steps to take with the team, the current sense that anything that can be described negatively must therefore really be bad, will hurt the future more than they will help. The team could certainly use, and will likely obtain, a better and more tactically intelligent manager; the FA could stand to be operated more transparently, and with greater accountability, which will require more targeted fan pressure before it comes to pass; and the youth system could stand to be improved (although the under-21 team is excellent). But there are limits to what needs to be changed, and recognizing those limits is as important as making the changes. England are a really good team, with some of the world’s best players, and they have been mismanaged. Whatever the media, bloggers, bereaved fans, or forum posters would have you believe, their character, insofar as it can be divined from a football match, was stronger than their gameplan on Wednesday night. Nothing worked, but they never gave up. And they would have made it through, despite everything, had it not been for those two feet.
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by Brian Phillips · November 25, 2007
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“begins in a state of exaggeration” that’s brilliant. What a perfect way of describing the medias reaction to it all. Never mind the England football team, how did the English sporting press get to be so bad.
On Friday night I did something that normally I never do. I listened to some pundits on the radio discussing the current “crisis” in English football. Listening to one pundit in particular was like hearing the audio equivalent of a Roy-Keane-veins-on-the-neck-bulging rant. It was nonsense. I couldn’t turn it off. I hated myself.
I think you’re quite right about the hysteria, and as trenttoffee says, that phrase some it up perfectly.
At the same time, I think there is root & branch reform needed in English football. Not of the kind most people blather on about (foreigners and all that), but there is a reason why our record in international football has been abysmal for — well, ever since we entered the World Cup for the first time in 1950.
Compare our record in the WCs and ECs to comparable European nations, and we’re desperately grateful for Spain’s amazing incompetence.
We have plenty of players good at something, but we’ve never had much idea how to play as a team tactically, and part of that is that we do not have strength in depth technically. We need to take a deep breath and start from the bottom.
Sure, we have enough good players that we could conceivable eke our way to a semi-finals again. International tournaments are something of a lottery. But there’s a reason why we always fall just short.
At one and the same time, we need less hysteria but more actual reform. Which is weird.
Tom – I’ve been thinking about this, and I think I would take your comment one step further and suggest that the hysteria for reform is likely to lead to less actual reform. The people in charge are more likely to make big, dramatic, isolated gestures (McClaren dropping Beckham as his first move, for instance) that impress the tabloid mob but don’t proceed from any detailed vision or plan.
I agree that the English approach needs changes, I just worry that the culture of overreaction will provoke splashy but ultimately counterproductive changes when the situation calls for dull, studied, technical, farsighted ones. I don’t know enough to agree or disagree with it, but I was fascinated by Martin Samuel’s argument that English youth players are made to play on full-sized pitches far too early in their development.
I think that’s the kind of thinking that needs to go into any possible reform, but at the same time, technical changes in youth development aren’t going to calm the frenzy. A lot of people want to see someone punished right now, I think, but reform based on that kind of emotional calculation is only going to lead to more trouble down the road.
Trenttoffee – Not necessarily through the radio, but something like that happens to me every week. It’s like driving past a car crash. You know it’s wrong, but you just can’t not slow down.
No “root & branch” reform needed. Leave it to free market economics. Trying to skew things in favour of more English players in the EPL, or, appointing a tactically savvy overseas coach and hitching him with an ‘apprentice’ just aren’t going to work.
England have a *good* U21 team with players who will cut it at the senior level. It’s good managerial/coaching talent that England desperately lacks. And rather than moaning about not getting the breaks they should perhaps take the trouble to learn French/Italian/Portugese/Spanish and spend some time abroad to see if they can learn a thing or three. Fair play to Chris Coleman. More of that spirit is required.