Do or die
FRANK KEATING The knives are glinting. The tabloids' art desks stand ready to superimpose the turnip's head. Should England's footballers fail to win the two home matches, against Israel on Saturday and Russia on Wednesday, they are surely doomed to elimination from next summer's European Championship finals, and their hapless manager Steve McClaren to redundancy and character assassination by a thousand cuts. As his teams have hobbled from one qualifying disappointment to another, there has always been the hope — presumption even — that when the endgame was called this autumn a fit and settled team would be in place handsomely to dismiss the doubters and bin their sarcastic jibes. After all, and in spite of having no track record to speak of, McClaren's jaunty enough front has always been an upbeat one — smart, smiling, assured and insistent on the snappy spin-doctor's optimistic 'positives' that, when it mattered, all would be right on the night.
Overtures done, the reckoning has now arrived. McClaren's persuasive convictions had long been grounded in the certainty that, no worries, these two crucial September matches would be won by an overwhelming force of nature, noise and national pride inspired by his England team's return to its rebuilt stadium, what he described as 'our fortress Wembley'. Alas, that was a far from infallible forecast: in the spluttering, haphazard loss to a secondstring German side in the rehearsal a fortnight ago, McClaren and his men were jeered long before the end, collective derision punctuated only by the sharp clack of plastic seats being upturned as thousands left early. Soon after half-time even, whole swaths of best-view debenture seats below the corporate hospitality boxes remained empty as the prawn-sandwich fat-cat legions preferred more fizz and longer chat about City bonuses to watching England's direly humdrum play. Fortress Wembley: oh dear. Mind you, some say McClaren would have been last to notice: his last job was at Middlesbrough when, a pal from the northeast tells me, Boro teams were routinely booed from the field — with even the club's reserves on the touchline usually joining in.
While McClaren's international formations and individual selections have sometimes seemed bizarre, in fairness to him, as qualification games have continued, he has too often been undone by untimely bad luck. If key players have not been injured, they've been carrying an injury, coming back too hastily from injury, out of form, out of sorts, suspended, retired disillusioned or even jetlagged. The last case, of course, was David Beckham's, who was meant to have been pensioned off 12 months ago. It was utterly ludicrous, wasn't it, to think that, willing as he was, the tattoed totem could possibly do justice either to England or to his Hollywood All-Stars XI (or whatever) while commuting for matches on transatlantic redeye flights? Beckham's latest injury presumably puts a permanent stop to that idiocy. As it is, should England fail in this autumn round of qualifiers, then the Los Angeles galactico's serious playing days are done — and, as well, McClaren's single ill-starred annus honibilis will be remembered by savage historians only as a long day's journey from D. Beckham to, er, D. Beckham.
Too hasty requiems? Sure. All's not lost. Three spanking Wembley wins against Israel, Russia and (in October) Croatia and good ol' Steve's Inger-land, Inger-land will be gloriously home and hosed, and — it is the way of an Englishman's world — bushy-tailed hot favourites for next summer. For the moment, however, those gleaming knives look cruelly sharp to me.
Previous page