Sunday, September 17, 2006
Are you Svennis in disguise ??
3 games in charge.....3 wins.....10 goals......3 clean sheets
Sounds great doesn't it ??
But lets not forget, the Swede had a very good record in qualifying as well yet when it came to the tournaments, he was found sadly lacking.
Worryingly enough, the signs are there that not a great deal has changed.
McClaren's first match was against reigning European Champions, Greece at Old Trafford. A tough test, you may think. No chance. Greece were awful....and I know awful football when I see it. I can't remember the last time I saw defenders with such a lack of position sense or purpose. Next up were Andorra, who are the worst international side I have ever seen in my life. They dived nearly as much as the Portuguese which takes some doing. Robinson didn't touch the ball for 42 minutes and then it was only a back-pass. They didn't manage a single shot or corner.....yet we can only put 5 past them. A few days later, Germany showed how teams like this should be dealt with by putting 13 past San Marino. Anyone who says there are no easy games in international football clearly haven't seen Andorra play.
When we play teams who are clearly weaker than us, we should be laying down a marker to other teams in the group. The lack of application against Andorra was a concern. Being ruthless is a good habit to get into we consistently lose at crucial stages of tournaments and I don't believe it's a conincidence that we also fail to perform to our levels when playing weaker sides. If you look at the goal times in the San Marino v Germany match, they were scored at regular intervals over the entire 90 minutes which suggest they applied themselves the same way for the whole match. Against Andorra, England only had 10 shots on target and their keeper only made one serious save. We just did enough to beat them. Scoring 10 or so goals against them would send out a message to Russia, Croatia and Israel saying when you play us, if you are even 10% under par, you will lose badly. 5-0 against Andorra was a barely adequate score and will do nothing to scare the other teams in our group.
The circus moved on to Skopje where we played Andorra. This is where Wayne Rooney became England's youngest ever scored with another laboured win. There was no Rooney this time but we did get another laboured win with Crouch continuing his impressive scoring record against the minnows of world football to give us a 1-0 win. It was yet another unconvincing performance where there could have been no complaints if Andorra had snatched a point. There were no obvious signs that Eriksson wasn't still calling the shots.
After the game all the old comments came out about "a win is a win", "no easy games" blah blah blah. These comments are made by staff and players to justify their own under perfomance. It's been nearly 12 months since England last put in a decent performance against Poland at Old Trafford and against the Argies in Geneva. Both games were on the backlash of dreadful results in Copenhagen and Belfast. Going back before then, I can't remember the last decent performance.
Of course, it's not possible to play well in every game but we rarely put on any sort of performance and until this changes, we will remain what we currently are, a top 8-10 team in the world. Nothing more, nothing less.
