The Hindu : Sport : Pride, passion and then sorrow

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jul 03, 2006

Sport

Sport

Pride, passion and then sorrow

Jason Cowley

Gelsenkirchen: After the match, his final defeat as England manager, Sven-Goran Eriksson seemed somehow much smaller as he prepared to take questions from his tormentors in the press.

In the days before the quarterfinal those closest to him had commented on his peculiar confidence, his newfound assertiveness. It was as if he refused to allow himself to believe that the team he had coached with only intermittent success for five-and-a-half years could lose to a Portugal side deprived of two of its most influential players — just as he had refused to believe that his best player, Wayne Rooney, whom most thought would be forced to miss the World Cup altogether, would not be with him in Germany.

In the event, Rooney was there in Germany, but only as a largely reduced and, in the end, fractious presence, sent off early in the second half on Saturday for violent conduct, leaving England to play the rest of the game with only 10 men.

Poor record

England managed a 0-0 draw after extra time, playing at times with a freedom with 10 men that had eluded it with 11 as it defended resiliently and, counter-attacking, sought to force an improbable win. It did not happen; in retrospect, it could never have happened.

Defeat, when it came, after a disastrous penalty shootout in which England missed three out of four kicks, was as brutal as it was inevitable, especially when you consider England's past record of capitulation at such moments of grand national occasion.

Yet Eriksson, in the confused aftermath of defeat, continued to act as if he could scarcely believe that his time was up and he spoke, oddly, of how `we still have the team to reach the final'.

This may have been a forgivable conflation of tenses from a tired man speaking in a foreign language that he has never fully mastered, but it was also indicative of a conviction that he had long held: that here in Germany it was to be England's destiny to play in its first World Cup final for 40 years. After all, wasn't this group of players — led and captained by international superstar David Beckham — meant to be our golden generation, the best we have had for more than 30 years?

Support from fans

Before the game, the fans had come to Gelsenkirchen from all over England and beyond in their tens of thousands, many without tickets or anywhere to stay at all. They came dressed in their red and white shirts and carrying their flags on an afternoon so warm that it seemed as if even the trees were perspiring.

They came in such overwhelming numbers because, in spite of all the mockery and criticism of their team's inadequacies, they still cared and they still dared to dream. If this was to be Sven's Last Stand, they wanted to be there for it in the city of a thousand fires, as Gelsenkirchen, the former coal mining capital of Germany, was once known.

The supporters, so resolute and so fervent, deserved something special from England — and what they got, once Rooney was gone, was the kind of robust, dogged performance in which they take a kind of ironic pride: determination in adversity.

It is not for nothing that the fans' chosen anthem is Elmer Bernstein's theme tune from the prisoner-of-war movie The Great Escape — a film that celebrates the nobility of courageous, if ultimately futile, resistance.

A splendid spectacle

Played in high humidity beneath the closed roof of the magnificent Stadium AufSchalke, one of the most technologically sophisticated arenas in world sport, the game was, after a slow start, a splendid spectacle, fraught with tension and a slow-burning dread that the game would ultimately be decided on penalties. What else?

What England and its supporters feared most as the drama of the occasion intensified was the horror of repetition: the knowledge that, when it mattered most, England had failed before and perhaps was destined to fail again. `Ever tried,' wrote Samuel Beckett. `Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'

England knows all too well about failing better, as well as failing again, and then again. It is a pattern that not even Eriksson, on a salary of at least £100,000 a week, has been able to alter.

What of England now? It will no doubt be a long farewell for Sven, the strange and singular Swede who was more complicated and interesting than he ever allowed us to discover.

There were some great moments — the 5-1 victory over Germany in a World Cup qualifier in Munich in 2001, the valiant 1-0 victory over Argentina at the last World Cup in Japan — as well as some entertaining tabloid capers involving Ulrika, Faria and the Fake Sheikh in Dubai.

But, in the end, on anyone's terms, but especially on his own, Eriksson's period as England manager, the highest-paid manager of his kind in the world game, was a failure where and when it mattered most — on the field of play, in international competition.

Not good enough

In three attempts at major tournaments, two World Cups and one European Championship, he could advance his band of preposterously affluent if undeniably talented players no further than the quarterfinal on each occasion. It was not good enough, as he himself conceded on Saturday night.

His England team played with courage and pride, as English players invariably do, but it was never much more than monoliths of grinding efficiency, as indeed it was for much of this tournament until suddenly liberated into a more expansive game following the injury to Beckham, which left him out of the game and weeping from the bench, and the dismissal of the naive and perhaps unfit Rooney.

In the end, England left this tournament unloved by the rest of the football world, because it played with such an unlovable absence of joy and of grace, except in defeat, which it accepted with weary resignation. At least, it never stopped being loved by its own fans, who were singing right to the end, a lone drummer trying to rouse the crowd into one final blast of the theme tune from the cherished anthem.

It is unlikely that Eriksson's successor, Steve McClaren, here in Germany as his assistant, will effect a dramatic transformation in England's fortunes, in the style of the innovative and intelligent Jurgen Klinsmann for Germany.

McClaren is, like Eriksson, an ultra-cautious pragmatist and under him England will no doubt continue much as before, muddling its way through to the quarterfinals but no more.

What England need now most of all is its own Klinsmann. What it has, most pressingly, is the memory of another traumatic and bitter defeat.

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