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bradley headstone - drawn to any world cup disgrace

Bad day at the office

Posted: June 16th 2010
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For Fabio anyway, the rest of us had said goodbye to the office and had regaled ourselves in the hopeless cloak of optimism that is the uniform of the England fan.

We all have days like this, every decision is a dud and the domino effect of the first leaves you too frightened to brush your teeth at night on the off chance you go in ‘studs up’. But I never expected it of our leader, surely the last to succumb to panic measures and untried theories?

In some ways it starts and ends with Green. England’s self proclaimed no6 and to be fair not a lot worse than every other England goalkeeper since Banks. But while Calamity and Hart occasionally hint at brilliance, Green has only ever suggested competence and he’s liberally sprinkled a fair portion of poor decisions and poor fortune with it.
England would probably have won a dour contest without his error, but if that were our only reason for concern then we’d all be less angst ridden at the moment.

James Milner a Fabio favourite was so far off the pace that you can only hope he was still ill and the genius of recalling King and Carragher crumbled as one fell apart and the other revealed himself to be slower than John Terry! Scratch beneath these obvious points and you find more headaches for Capello. Lennon and Shaun Wright-Phillips looked ‘lively’ I was repeatedly told as they repeatedly failed to pass to another white shirt, Heskey was ‘magnificent’ as another hopeful punt pinged haphazardly from his permanently furrowed brow. Most disappointing was the inability of Rooney, Gerrard or Lampard to do anything to change the course of the game. All three fell further and further back into their shells. I’m not particularly surprised about Gerrard, his demeanour for Liverpool is increasingly round shouldered and resigned and he’s seamlessly transferred this to England, but where was Rooney’s temper and what of public school Frank? Surely with the posh boys running the country he’d have felt empowered, pre-destined even, to drive England to glory. No, he just ponced about as usual.

In the cold light of day, we reflected more soberly on the performance. In truth this isn’t a far from the team that destroyed Croatia twice. Admittedly that isn’t going to scare Brazil or probably even South Korea, but it suggests that England can make a decent fist of this campaign. It does, and this is my opinion you understand, rely an awful lot on one key figure. If England are going to go beyond the last 16 then Gareth Barry and more importantly Gareth Barry’s ankle are going to have to have the tournament of his life. In the absence of Rio and Ledley, the slow motion, morally despicable pairing of Terry and Carragher play so deeply that I’m surprised neither could clear the ball when Green dropped it. The real difficulty they cause is the gap between the midfield and their rabbit in the headlights positioning. Donovan and Dempsey had acres on Saturday night and it led to their goal...well to the shot anyway.
From now on Gareth Barry will be our third centre back or he’ll be available to work the barby for the next round.

That’s my two-penneth, just as valid is my partner’s take on all this. She found herself getting tense on Saturday and suddenly thought ‘why do I want the likes of John Terry to win the World Cup anyway’?

Hard to argue with...