The Hindu : Sport : Eriksson lacks `forward' thinking

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jun 13, 2006

Sport

Sport

Eriksson lacks `forward' thinking

Richard Williams

Walcott needs more time, feels the England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson

So now we know that Englishmen could have saved the many thousands of pounds spent on block-booking the Schlosshotel Bühlerhöhe and flying in the Wembley turf experts to relay the pitch at the Mittelbergstadion.

Rather than enjoying the pleasant breezes wafting through the vineyards in the Black Forest hills, they would have been better off staying at one of Heathrow's airport hotels and practising under the flightpath on Chelsea's old training ground in the English heatwave.

Whatever sweat-soaked route they are destined to follow through this World Cup, however, Sven-Goran Eriksson's players will not again be required to kick off in the early afternoon.

After the shattering experience of failure in Shizuoka's steaming heat four years ago, Eriksson might have been better prepared for the possibility of 100-degree temperatures at pitch level. Yet, as usual, England players were disconcerted when things did not go exactly according to its expectations.

Rather than suiting their approach to the environment, they came out at full speed and intensity, only to run out of puff long before the match had reached its conclusion.

Nasty surprise

It was lucky for Eriksson that this nasty surprise occurred in the opening match, against relatively modest opposition, and not against, say, Brazil in the quarterfinals. What will inevitably recur are the questions about the individual fitness and the overall balance of his squad.

After admitting that neither David Beckham nor Michael Owen was fully fit in Japan in 2002, Eriksson made it plain that physical integrity would be a prime concern in the preparation of the 2006 squad.

And in the last couple of weeks we have listened as he and his staff and players have spoken frequently about the unsurpassed levels of fitness registered in tests on the current group.

Well, temporary exhaustion during a match played in oven-like conditions is one thing. The condition of Owen and Ashley Cole, however, will take a bit more explaining.

When Owen was removed, after only 55 minutes, he had contributed virtually nothing to the match. Yet again he had looked short not just of pace but of touch. Cole, too, is nowhere near the condition that gives him a place in arguments about the world's best left-back, and his rustiness was disturbingly obvious on Saturday. His long recovery from a broken metatarsal, like Owen's convalescence, has left England in almost exactly the position they were in four years ago.

Genius, of course, makes its own arrangements, which is why Eriksson was right to make an exception for Wayne Rooney. The head coach's willingness to get into a fight with Sir Alex Ferguson is now looking even more like a decision taken on behalf of the whole nation. But you cannot make exceptions for three members of a squad of 23 without severely weakening it and that much became even more apparent when Owen was withdrawn, exposing the extent of Eriksson's dilemma.

In an ideal world, Eriksson would have made a like-for-like substitution. Having examined his resources, however, he declined to call on Theo Walcott, the only striker on the bench.

He had considered bringing on the untried 17-year-old. "But for the first game in the World Cup," he said, "that needs more time, more training."

If Walcott was not ready to play on Saturday, then surely he should not have been included in the party in the first place.

Unless, of course, Eriksson has a cunning plan, perhaps one that involves keeping Walcott under wraps and unleashing him on unsuspecting opponents at the critical stage of a sudden-death game.

Too early

Cunning plans, however, are not Eriksson's style. With him, in tactical terms, what you see is what you get, and it is much more likely that, having observed Walcott in training, he has simply concluded that this is a tournament too early for the teenager to make an impact.

It is too late now to change that. The immediate concern is the lack of concentrated urgency in England's attacking, particularly in comparison with the dynamism demonstrated by Argentina, Ivory Coast, Holland and Germany.

But a win is a win. We should wait to see what Eriksson's team could do in the comparative cool of a Thursday evening before attempting a definitive judgment. —

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