7 things England must do before they can win the World Cup

England’s embarrassing mauling at the hands of Germany has left us yet again feeling unfulfilled at the World Cup.

Yet no matter how much we pay foreign coaches to come and sort out our brave boys, nothing seems to change. Something bigger is wrong in English football.

Here is a list of seven things that will give England a better chance of competing at World Cups in the future.

• Remove the conflicts of interest at the FA
  The biggest problem facing English football is the amount of power wielded by the Premier League. It’s chairman, Sir David Richards, is not alone in also holding a senior position on the FA board. Major decisions are weighted in favour of the Prem rather than the national team.
• Stop blaming the manager
  Every time England disappoint at a major tournament, the easiest target is the manager. Yet the current “Golden Generation” has now failed to produce the goods under three separate coaches, both English and foreign, disciplinarian or lasse-faire. Coincidence?
• Introduce a winter break
  Here are three things to consider:

  1) When the World Cup qualifying fixtures were decided, Fabio Capello was desperate to ensure that England played the toughest fixtures early in the season. He succeeded, England won them.

  2) Franz Beckenbauer was not the only observer to suggest that the England team are jaded and tired.

  3) How many Premier League stars, of any nation, have really shone at this World Cup? Name two.

• Reform youth football
  Is it healthy that the focus of youth football is to win matches to quench the thirst of blood-thirsty parents? The emphasis on results and XI-a-side games breeds simple, direct football with a neglect of technical skills and tactical intelligence.

  When things go wrong for the England team, they have only these limited insufficient methods to fall back on, hence the apparent eagerness to resort to the aimless hoof. Which leads nicely into…

• Encourage a continental style of football
  This much is obvious: traditional English football is outdated. It does not win international football tournaments. Nowadays the game is all about versatile, roving forwards, wingers who cut inside and a patient, probing short passing game.

  For England to be successful in future World Cups, our entire footballing ethos needs to change. We shall call this process “Arsene-ification”. To be successful in this, English football will have to…

• Educate the fans
  Have you listened to a 606 phone-in lately? Did you wonder where they find those people? Is Alan Shearer any better?

  Hopefully your answers were “Only out of morbid curiosity”, “Yes” and “Not on your Nellie”.

  When England have tried to patiently build from the back, they have often been jeered by their own fans, who would prefer to see a quick ball bounce off Emile Heskey and dribble to a defender.

  This is the norm on an average Saturday of blood and thunder Premier League action. Try it against XI Germans, Spaniards, Brazilians or Argentines and you’ll quickly look like a numpty.

• Get Burton sorted out
  Italy has Coverciano, France has Clairefontaine, Argentina has the streets of Buenos Aires, England has…well, a field in the middle of Staffordshire with a fence around it.

  The problem this leaves the FA is that coaching and, more crucially producing world class coaches, is a haphazard affair left mainly in the hands of clubs.

  Improve English coaches and you improve English footballers.

Suffice it to say that most of these things will never happen.

So let’s all sit down, take a deep breath, consider all the facts and then….ah, stuff it, let’s just get rid of the Italian.

England were completely, utterly, embarrassingly destroyed by Germany. 4-1. Or, 4-2 if your name is not Jorge Larrionda, but that’s for another post, another day.

The simple truth about this match was that England played like a toilet. A broken toilet.

Germany should be given credit, and not just for this cakewalk. Their entire footballing infrastructure is built to service the needs of die Mannschaft.

So much so that Oliver Khan was recently quoted saying that Bayern Munich always aim to field the German number 1 between the sticks.

Painful though it may be, there is a simple solution for the FA to adopt. It is to follow the German example, tear power away from the Premier League and gear our grass roots youth coaching to producing intelligent, technically gifted footballers.

It won’t happen.

The phantom Frank Lampard goal brought back memories of 1966, but you need to set your time circuits back a further 13 years to find an accurate parallel to the England performance today.

Today was 1953 all over again. The scoreline may as well have been 6-3, Mesut Oezil may as well have been Nandor Hidegkuti, Thomas Mueller Ferenc Puskas.

England’s Brave and Loyal John Terry became England’s Slow and Ponderous John Terry. The entire defence was dragged about at will by the creative positioning and movement of the rampant German attackers.

It was a shambles.

What will actually happen is that the media will hound Fabio Capello out of his job, assuming he doesn’t resign first. The FA, again led by the media, will appoint England’s Brave Harry Redknapp or Woy Hodgson and we will experience the same crushing disappointment in 2012.

The Premier League will continue on in it’s hype-drenched, 100mph, long ball way, masking English shortcomings with “excitement” and foreign technique.

No wonder so many English football fans have abandoned the national team in disillusionment.

People will blame Capello, his tactics, his team selection, his man-management. This avoids the issue that English footballers lack, not technique, but intelligence.

They cannot handle the complexities of modern football in the same way that Harry Johnson could not cope with the movement of Hidegkuti at Wembley in 1953.

The media must take their share of the blame for the way they shape the opinions and expectations of the nation.

The standard of punditry and analysis of both the BBC and ITV has been a disgrace at this World Cup. The ridiculous jingoism has lurched from overhyped optimism to morbid depression and back again. And then again.

They can’t understand, we are repeatedly told, why players can perform week in and week out in Sky’s orgy of kick and rush and not at international level. Which is odd because there is a whole generation of fans who are knowledgable and intelligent followers of the worldwide game who have very little difficulty identifying the problems that Alan Shearer and Andy Townsend cannot.

If England ever want to compete at a World Cup again, the FA need to swallow their pride, clear out the conflicts of interest and put the game ahead of cash for once.

If they do this, then we can justifiably call this another 6-3. If not, the England team will continue to bumble along in it’s idiotic way, twenty years out of touch with the rest of world football.

You may not be aware of this yet, but England will play Germany in the last 16.

When it became clear that it was England v Germany next up, I had mixed feelings.

I very much like Germany as a country, and a people. I have learnt “ein bisschen” German, but not as much as I would like. I also have Germanic ancestry from the 18th century.

So in a footballing and a personal sense I am greatly looking forward to the match on Sunday. May the best
team win and all that (I don’t think that means England, but who knows).

On the other hand, I am sorely vexed at the prospect, entirely because of the ashen media volcano that always erupts around this fixture.

You see, England and Germany have twice played each other for keeps on a far larger field.

Most likely you, or quite possibly even your parents, were not even born when the full time whistle was blown on those encounters. Yet they still influence your life every day in ways that you cannot understand.

Football is for many an escape from the trials of life, a chance to throw their weight behind a cause that can have no ill effect on their day-to-day lives beyond work place banter.

Yet, when it comes to the England team, that becomes impossible. Every encounter, it seems, carries with it some socio-political or historical undertone, be it a hand-me-down from imperial prejudices or the remnants of some distant conflict.

As Simon Kuper wrote in the Financial Times recently:

The team is engulfed by warrior rhetoric. “Their finest hour (and a half)”, was The Sun newspaper’s headline before England-Algeria. The reference to Winston Churchill’s wartime speech of exactly 70 years earlier was typical. In England, the football team is usually discussed as if it were fighting a war. The tabloids produce this rhetoric, but many players and managers – great consumers of tabloids – swallow it. Hence all the talk in the England camp about the need for “spirit”. This irritates those who believe that British soldiers of the two world wars are not the only possible ideals of masculine behaviour.

Sport, it was once said, is war without the guns. To the Victorian sporting codifiers and missionaries this was certainly true – sport was a way to foster the rugged manliness that they so craved.

Much of the rest of the world has left this attitude behind. Yes, sport still excites passions and tempers, but it is not informed, for the most part, by the rhetoric of war. The England football team is one of the exceptions to that rule – the same cannot be said of our cricket team, where international relations with supporters of other nations are of mostly good natured banter.

With all of this in mind, it is no wonder that a match between England and Germany will bring out the worst in our media, and this is not always limited to the tabloids.

The days of the infamous “Achtung! Surrender” front page in the Daily Mirror before the Euro ‘96 semi-final, may seem behind us – unless you “read” the Daily Star, in which case you are not reading this – but the general theme is the same.

We will still get a full dose of “don’t mention the score”, “our brave boys”, the great escape, dambusters and all the rest, from both media and fans. Hopefully the vuvuzelas will drown out the chants in the stadium, but don’t bank on it.

There is no relevance to any of this filth beyond the names of the “protaganists” (whoops, there we go again). Neither country or it’s football team bears any relation to the nations of 1914 or 1938.

The current German team is a very multi-cultural outfit, a fact that is celebrated amongst Germans in a way I strongly suspect it would not be in England. You might argue about the youthfulness and vibrancy of the England team, but it’s players too have a their own multi-cultural roots, if not as diversely.

Additionally, our “great footballing rivalry” with Germany is almost completely one sided. Yes, there is a footballing significance to any match against another major footballing nation, but otherwise for most Germans it is just another game. They are aware of the footballing history between the two nations, of course, but it does not inform their view on the outcome of this one.

It’s not as if our nation is free of skeletons in the closet, but I doubt the American newspapers, for instance, were full of references to Kings Mountain or Yorktown before the opening game in Group C.

So this really is all about the English. Are we able to support our national team without descending to the lowest common denominator?

If the reports of English fans’ good behaviour in South Africa are anything to go by, then yes we can, yet this is a fact entirely lost on much of our tubthumping and moronic media.

For England this can never be just a game, or even a healthy footballing rivalry, until we shed ourselves of the need to equate football with war.

Perhaps if we did, we might just find that football becomes a much more enjoyable game.

Quanno fa notte e ‘o sole se ne scenne,
me vene quase ‘na malincunia;

When night comes and the sun has gone down,
I almost start feeling melancholy;

['O Sole Mio]

On 9th July 2006, Fabio Cannavaro lofted the World Cup trophy into the Berlin sky.  It was the completion of Italy’s footballing salvation from the train-wreck of Calciopoli, a scandal that had rocked Calcio to the very core and shamed the nation’s most famous club, the venerable Old Lady of Turin.

The Azzurri’s trip to Germany was a form of escapism from a home life that seemed intolerable, and there they found the spirit necessary to conquer the world for a fourth time.

On 24th June 2010, Italy bowed out of the World Cup in ignominy, eliminated from the group stages for the first time since 1974.  They have finished even below the minnows of New Zealand in Group F, a mere two points to their name.

Despite a stirring finish in the final game against Slovakia, it was not to be.  Marcello Lippi’s return only served to prove the unwritten rule that you never, ever go back, even if last time you managed to win the World Cup.

The end of an era

It is an end of an era in more ways than that.  Fabio Cannavaro, Gennaro Gattuso, Gianluca Zambrotta, Mauro Camoranesi, perhaps even Andrea Pirlo – all of these players will not be seen gracing a World Cup again.  A new generation is required, something many Italians had been crying out to be introduced before the World Cup.

Lippi stuck for the most part with his 2006 vintage, and history will require that it is this choice, this failing, that has cost Italy.

Watching the match was akin to seeing a once great warrior battling a younger, yet less talented, foe.  In their glory days, this Italy would have landed the killer blows for which they no longer possess the wit or speed of thought.

By half time they knew they were in trouble.  On came Fabio Quagliarella and Christian Maggio to try and stem the tide.  After another fruitless 10 minutes, they turned to the wounded hero, Andrea Pirlo.  He wasn’t fit, he shouldn’t have been there but still he sparked Italy into life with his probing passes.

Then a hammer blow from Slovakia, Robert Vittek scoring a second.  Still Italy fought on, grimacing through the pain of a near fatal wound.  Di Natale scored and there was still time.

Another goal was disallowed, correctly but cruelly.  Then Kupenek scored a third for Slovakia, breezing past Daniele De Rossi as though he were in slow motion.  A cruel and clinical defeat for the Italians then?

Little did we know.  Into stoppage time, Quagliarella recieved the ball on the edge of the area and floated it beautifully past Jan Mucha and into the goal.

Then came the chance to land a death blow of their own, and against all odds.  A cross from the right found it’s way to the far post and there was Simone Pepe.  Surely he would score?  But Pepe could not attack it with his favourite foot, and he agonisingly shot wide.

This time it really was over.  Lippi stormed to the dressing room without waiting to shake any hands or offer any formalities, in a parallel with the undignified end to Raymond Domenech’s reign over France.

Perhaps, from our aloof English last 16 vantage point, we should take a moment to consider the narrow margins upon which such rises and falls of greatness hang.

Had Simone Pepe struck the ball to the right of the post instead of the left in the 95th minute, the world would be hailing Italian resilience, a stunning comeback from the dead and the continuation of the vintage of 2006.  Instead, suddenly it was laid bare for all to see that a once great generation has become “molto stanco”.

Had Matthew Upson not thrust out a boot, had Jermain Defoe struck the ball to the right of the post instead of the left, there would today be an English generation that was very tired, consigned to the annals of history with a footnote that says “not good enough anymore”.

So as we bid the Azzurri farewell, let us at least remember 2006.  A generation has fallen, yes, but not before they had secured the ultimate prize.

So the disaster was averted.  The flight home can wait until next week at least.  England 1 – 0 Slovenia.

England were much better, without quite looking like world beaters but it will do, and finish as runners up in Group C after USA scored a 92nd minute winner against Algeria.

Suddenly the mood has shifted again.  From the downright gloom and gallows humour of the last 5 days, England have found a way to get themselves back on track.  Fabio Capello is the world’s greatest manager again, John Terry is no longer a traitor, Wayne Rooney was cheered to the rafters and everything is well.

But Donovan’s late show could prove to be significant for England, it’s potential yield being Germany, Argentina and Spain or Brazil if they are to reach the final.  I guess, after seeming as though it was all falling apart, we will accept it gleefully all the same.

Fabio Capello can rightfully feel vindicatied over his tactical decisions in this tournament, as his choices of James Milner and Jermain Defoe in place of Aaron Lennon and Emile Heskey paid off, the two combining for the goal.

Steven Gerrard showed the tactical discipline that was missing against Algeria, drifting inside far more selectively and providing a better shape to the midfield as a result.  The passing was vastly improved, and England’s long passes also showed more creativity, as they had to in the absence of Heskey.  One raking 60 yard pass by Glenn Johnson to trigger Rooney on the counter was a particular highlight.

Rooney himself was also improved, without pulling up trees, but there was a slight concern again over his fitness and he was replaced in the 2nd half.  Not before he had forced a wonderful save from the outstanding Samir Handanovic, just getting enough of his fingers to Rooney’s shot to deflect it onto the post.

And what of England’s Knight in Shining Armour?  There was no start for St. Joe Cole, and his substitute appearance showed why that was as he struggled to make an impact.  When things are going badly, it is always the player who is left out who’s reputation increases, and here was another example.

The evidence for the prosecution – his late season form for Chelsea and subsequent release and the rapid denial of interest from Old Trafford – was discarded in favour of the grass-is-greener absent-hero syndrome to which the English media succumb every time.  Once again, they were proved to be wrong.

The end of the match was as tense as we have come to expect – defending deeper and conceding space, last ditch tackles and an extraordinary effort by John Terry to block a goal bound shot with his face.  Understandably, the ball felt justified in choosing an alternate target, but still England survived.

So England have finally made some kind of impact on the tournament other than the soggy lettuce variety, and will play again on Sunday in the “round of 16″ as FIFA like to call it.  For the nation’s fans, the joy and torture can continue a while longer.