England 2 Uruguay 1
Pouso 24, Crouch 74, Cole 93
My conclusions after last night’s game :
1.We can score late goals in friendlies.
2. Rooney is our best defender.
3. As a team-mechanic, Sven is clueless.
4. As always with England, the result was better than the performance. Even when we lose, the result is better than the performance. We are fierce competitors who are better at winning than playing. When we are 1-0 down we are the best team in the world.
5.We will not improve much in the next 99 days before the World Cup. We are what we are. We are a team of journeymen who produce obvious passes with metronomic regularity.
John Terry is a journeyman who is an enterprising leader.
Beckham is a journeyman with marketing charisma.
Crouch is a journeyman whose spirit I learned to love at QPR.
Darren Bent is a journeyman who was ignored by his teammates for 90% of this game.
Gary Neville is a journeyman who was very good in Portugal 2004.
Owen is a journeyman who scores goals.
Lampard is a super-journeyman who does everything competently and scores goals
Stevie Gerrard is a journeyman who would be a match-winning gladiator in the right format .
Gerrard should NOT have hogged the ball in midfield on a night when Sven brought Carrick in to play that role. His passing was atrocious. Uruguay let him have the ball and he gave it away. He had one of those nights where he was the big guy with the big shot, the big pass, the big tackle, but no game, no ability to mix craftsmanship with power. He was rushing everything because he knew he was coming off at half time.
Stevie G is a dynamic player, not a strategic one. His special talent is for making things happen in the last third with dribbles, runs, crosses, shots and headers.
He is not Jan Molby, not Graeme Souness. Rafa knows how to use Stevie G but Sven doesn’t. Gerrard should be competing with Beckham and Joe Cole for a flank position.
Stevie is a lovely lad with a terrific sporting attitude. No tattoos, no earrings, no silly hairstyles, talks modestly, a smashing young guy. But the Swede doesn’t know how to use him. It’s tragic, really. Sven is just not good at the nuts and bolts of team-building. He can’t take the wheels off and put them back on again, let alone tune up the engine.
Apart from Wayne Rooney, a third-generation Irish immigrant, we lack flair and suss. We could not work out how to play against a team who defended the box with eight men.
Then Crouch and SWP came on, replacing Beckham and Rooney, and they won the game for lucky old Sven.
ROONEY had covered huge distances at very high speed. He raced back down the left side to make tackles on Forlan and Regueiro and it was Rooney who conceded the corner from which led to the Pouso goal. He is the only striker in world football who races back as fast to make a tackle as he sprints forward to score a goal. His appetite is huge, his rage to win enormous. We haven’t seen anyone with such a rage to win since another Irishman screamed “You cannot be serious !” at a Wimbledon umpire. Flair and rage are in the genes.
Just as Ian Rush was Liverpool’s best defender, Wayne Rooney is England’s best defender.
EXCUSES ?
We had not played for three months, so we lacked fluency.
The situation suited defensive visitors like Uruguay. Terry got good distance on when headed out that corner in the 24th minute and the ball unluckily fell to Pouso, whose volley looped into the top corner. A great goal, not a fluke, but it was unlucky that that the ball dropped straight on the guy’s right foot. That’s football. After that Uruguay sat back and broke occasionally with quick invention. Individually, they have the craft that we lack.
CONSOLATIONS?
Peter Crouch changes games and Joe Cole can now give a 90-minute performance. Cole can make bright runs off the ball into dangerous areas, whip in accurate crosses, score from outside the penalty area, and sniff out chances in the six yard box. His game has become efficient and pragmatic. Where once he dribbled and flicked and fiddled and fired five shots just wide, he now opens up defences and wins games.
On 21, he flew onto Carrick’s pass and fired just past the post.
On 23, he played in Beckham, who would have scored and taken the knock in a World Cup game. But here, as Carini got to him quickly, he rushed it and jabbed his left foot shot just wide of the angle.
On 30, keeper Paul Robinson clattered clumsily into the back of Wayne Bridge just after Pousa’s goal, damaging his ankle ligament. His panicky goalkeeping puts Bridge out of Fulham’s game with Arsenal on Saturday.
On 74, Joe Cole hooked a cross over for Crouch to head the equaliser and in 93 he nipped onto Shaun Wright Phillips’s low cross to the near post and scored the winner from three yards.
In the last two seasons Joe Cole has improved far beyond what I expected. He had surprised me and very few footballers do that. Well done, son. Keep it going. We need you.
Sadly, Sven’s England will never be a Saab or a Mercedes. On a good night it will be Ford Escort Mk 7 and on a bad night it will be a rusty old Vauxhall Cavalier.
How will I approach Germany 2006 in 99 day’s time ?
Same way as always. Watch the first two weeks and find a couple of good teams to follow. If England are one of those, fine.
FOR THE RECORD :
ENGLAND: Robinson (Tottenham); Gary Neville (Man United), Terry (Chelsea), Ferdinand (Man United), Bridge (Chelsea); Beckham (Real Madrid), Gerrard (Liverpool), Carrick (Tottenham), Cole (Chelsea); Rooney (Man United), Bent (Charlton).
Subs: Carragher (Liverpool) for Bridge, 31; King (Tottenham) for Terry, 45; Jenas (Tottenham) for Gerrard,45 ; Wright-Phillips (Chelsea) for Beckham, 64; Crouch (Liverpool) for Rooney, 64; Defoe (Tottenham) for Bent, 82.
URUGUAY: Carini (Cagliari); Diogo (Real Madrid), Lugano (Sao Paulo), Godin (Cerro), Lima (Danubio); Perez (Monaco), Pouso (Penarol), Vargas (Gimnasia), Varela (Schalke); Regueiro (Valencia), Forlan (Villarreal).
Subs: Viera (keeper, Villarreal) for Carini, 45; Pereira (Sporting) for Vargas, 77; Martinez (Montivideo) for Regueiro, 84; Medina (Cadiz) for Forlan, 87; Gonzalez (Danubio) for Perez, 88.
Referee: Stefano Farina (Italy).
PS. Thanks for your emails about the new site. Most readers like the free service we provide. One tells us what we should be doing. Another reader has asked me to write a tribute to Peter Osgood. Yesterday I was far too upset to write anything sensible. And I’m still down about it.