We hate to see we told you so but…
Earlier in the week I bemoaned the poor quality of passing in the England team and quoted examples of two sublime passes from the season past, no pun intended. Then on Tuesday evening I watched large chunks of the Under 21 game and was pleasantly astonished at the quality of England's precise passing that not only maintained possession but, significantly, edged that possession forward into opposing territory.
Imagine then the sheer joy at the opening five minutes of England's Euro 2004 qualifier against Slovakia where such passing by the seniors bamboozled the visitors. And in that opening five minutes plus I don't think England gave the ball away and THE gem, on a night when the bottom fell out of the domestic 'diamond' market, came with less than 50 seconds on the clock. 'THE PASS OF 2003' was produced by Steven Gerrard and it was exactly the kind of pass I referred to on Tuesday.
HERE'S WHAT BEARDO SAID…
England have been criticised for building up too slowly, engaging in possession play for the sake of it, but they are not. They are simply waiting for enough movement and space in which to play a killer pass BUT, and it is a big BUT, when the opportunity does arise the frustration is that few England players seem capable, or inclined, to thread a ball through.
You know the kind of ball I mean. It's when a midfielder carries the ball and sees his forwards jockeying for an opening and when he slides the ball through, it perfectly bisects a back-line and when a forward reached the ball it is so perfectly weighted that all the striker has to do is make clean contact.
So, straight from the Beardo coaching manual, Gerrard put Slovakia's defensive line on the back-foot with an instinctive, slide-rule pass that put Michael Owen in on goal only for the striker to be denied by the faintest of touches by the keeper. Had the England skipper been as fine-tuned to the start of the game as his Liverpool colleague then neither the team nor its fans would have been subjected to the following 44 minutes that were fraught with the dangerous possibility of Slovakia gaining an insurmountable three goal lead.
The major problems with the much vaunted 'diamond' formation are; the huge space between point, Paul Scholes, and anchor, Phil Neville and the lack of width, not to mention yet more use, on Wednesday, of a central midfield player wide in the troubled left flank slot.
As soon as Sven-Goran Eriksson switched to 4-4-2 there was more balance in the side, and less space for Slovakia to exploit, as well as double barriers protecting the England flanks, which the visitors couldn't overcome.
It was a measure of the urgent need to alter his personnel that Eriksson threw Owen Hargreaves on, for Danny Mills, before half-time, but TWO MINUTES before the break begs the questions; how attuned to the game would the Bayern player get in that short space of time and why on earth did the Swede not turn just past the half hour by which time Slovakia's goal attempts outnumbered England's by 7-2 and at which stage they led 1-0?
By the time the interval arrived the visitors had added another three goal attempts and the half time scoreline, thanks to an improvement in home goal attempts, could quite conceivably been 3-3 or even 4-4.
Much praise has been heaped upon Sven's interval pep talk, as well as his tactical change, but personally I wonder how much of an affect the boos that echoed down from the Riverside stands, as the England team trooped off, heads bowed, had in geeing up those same England players as they proceeded to produce a sparkling second-half fight-back that was ably abetted by the introduction of Darius Vassell for Der Wunderkid Wayne Rooney just short of the hour.
It's now a part of historical record that England won 2-1 and on the night it was very much a case of the result being more important than the performance, as it keeps the pressure on Turkey. But, however meritorious the England character was in fighting back to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, it must not hide the fact that, for most the first half, England's formation and tactics were horribly wrong.
And if the Slovakian team had not been so profligate in the face of some woeful defending then Sven's side would now be five points adrift of the Turks instead of two.
Assuming England beat Macedonia and Liechtenstein, and Turkey improve their goal difference over the latter, defeat to Slovakia on Wednesday, which for 45 minutes was very much on the cards, would have left England requiring a win in Turkey…mmm, yes, my thoughts exactly.
