Quintin Jardine's blog

Latest from my friend Scott. ‘The England team are planning to fly back to Glasgow, so they can have a heroes’ welcome.’

Yes, they were shambolic. We’re better than that at the back, even with a 40-year-old at the heart of our defence. The England fans are always victims of their own unrealistic expectations, fuelled by their media. That said, such a catastrophic defensive collapse couldn’t have been predicted. What could have, was a lack of creativity in midfield which led to Wayne Rooney being nullified. To an extent the same is happening to Messi and Cristiano, but the Argentinians and Portuguese have other quality players to compensate, plus they’re capable of tactical variations. England lack such class in depth, and their manager proved himself inflexible and unusually blinkered. When you have a forward  (Crouch) who scores two goals for every three games that he starts for England and another (Heskey) who averages a goal every nine, and you opt persistently for the latter, you are a tactical genius if it works, and an idiot if it doesn’t. The media should all have smelled a rat when Gareth Barry suddenly became indispensable. Any team that needs him can’t be much ******* good. Manchester City didn’t exactly carry all before them last season, did they?

To be fair to Capello, England suffered badly from the loss of Rio Ferdinand, who organises the defence on the field.  To offset that fairness, he replaced him against Germany with Upson rather than Carragher, another choice that defied all logic. Ledley King should never have been let out of rehab, far less on the plane.

However, for me it was the absence of Becks that was the most significant. Even at 35, he has an ability to change the direction of the game with a single pass that no other player in the squad can match, plus, he is a massive authority figure, without being remote from the rest of the players. If I ran the FA … having been appointed to replace the idiot who gave Capello a  new contract just before he boarded the plane for South Africa … I’d beg him to take on the manager’s job. I am not kidding. It’s time for a different English approach. As the Germans did with Jurgen Klinsmann, and the Dutch with MvB, give the job to someone who’s played at that level recently and who’ll put passion and instinct before rigid theory. Becks is the man, and his love of his country might not allow him to refuse. Klinsmann did the job while living in the US so . . . why not?

Why did England do so well in the qualifiers and so badly in the World Cup? IMO, it was because Capello only had the squad together for ten days, max. Six weeks of military discipline left them demoralised, uncertain of their own individual ability and pissed off.

In their other national sport, England are currently engaged in a five match series against their other arch-enemy, Australia. While the ritual humiliation was under way, the cricketers were in the process of beating the Aussies to take a winning 3 — 0 lead. Nobody noticed.

You know the classic speaker’s metaphor about all the darkness in the world not extinguishing the light of one small candle? Why is it that losing one football match seems to reverse that?