England vs Croatia

Pre-match: Well, the BBC have managed to upset me already, by playing Labi Siffre’s elegant anti-Apartheid anthem “So Strong” while looking back over their constant close shaves in qualifying for the finals of major tournaments. Grrr. If the commentary for this match suddenly switches over to Wales-Germany without any warning, you’ll know the reason why. Elsewhere, Steve McClaren is still grinning like an idiot, though there is, just from looking at him, still the faint whiff of the condemned man about him. You know how you looked at Graham Taylor shouting and screaming during the 1994 World Cup qualifying campaign and thought, “oh no”? Yeah. It’s a bit like that. Meanwhile, it has been raining in London all day and the Wembley pitch is absolutely sodden. In all seriousness, I wouldn’t be half surprised if the match was abandoned, if the rain gets a lot worse. Mind you, there are some men out there prodding at it with garden forks, so the vast resources of the FA are already tackling the problem. The England team lines up as follows: Carson, Richards, Bridge, Campbell, Lescott, Barry, Wright-Phillips, Gerrard, Lampard, Joe Cole, Crouch. Now, I’m all in favour of picking youth where possible, but this team leaves me feeling uneasy. It could be Sol Campbell’s last match for England tonight, by the way. Also, Paul Robinson’s form may have collapsed of late, but I’m not certain about Scott Carson starting such an important match in goal. My final massive concern (I haven’t got the time to go into my feelings on Gerrard and Lampard both starting, on recent form, right now) is the lack of fire-power, with Peter Crouch starting more or less on his own up front. What a brilliant move it was, playing an injury prone striker like Michael Owen in Vienna last Friday night. Anyway, back in fifteen, in time for kick-off.

20.00: The pitch looks as bad from a distance as it did close up. The referee looks like Arsene Wenger, which is very unsettling indeed.

20.05: Who are these people that insist on taking big bass drums into football stadia? What on earth makes them think that this is what I want to hear? If I wanted a big bass drum, I’d switch this off and listen to “Physical Graffiti” by Led Zeppelin instead. Actually, England haven’t started badly. Now, there’s a hex.

20.08: Goal – England 0-1 Croatia: What did I say? What did I say? A moderate shot from outside the area from Krankjar, and Carson spills the ball in to give Croatia the lead. It’s all gone quiet over there.

20.11: Wright-Phillips gets the ball in space and shoots, but is blocked. This is followed by a wholly unconvincing claim for a penalty. With eighty minutes to go, where is this goal going to come from?

20.17: Wembley has gone almost eerily quiet, now. Steve McClaren is holding onto a concrete post in the manner of a man about to have a heart attack, and his head has gone very purple.

20.21: Bloody hell. The BBC are getting desperate now. They’re still saying that England are still home and dry because (you’re going to like this) Russian haven’t scored against Andorra yet. Yet.

20.28: Awww. He’s cuddling his umbrella now. For all the effect that they’ve had so far, neither Gerrard nor Lampard could be playing, and it would have made no difference whatsoever.

20.33: Croatia, John Motson has just told me, have been down to ten men for the last five minutes, and I hadn’t even noticed. England are starting to look busier, but it’s all haste and no speed. They’re just going to keep lumping balls into the penalty and nothing will come of it. Believe it or not, I haven’t got a crystal ball.

20.41: Hooray! Russia have scored against Andorra!

20.43: Carson flaps at a shot from distance like a nun swatting a fly. This could end up 4-0 or 5-0, at this rate.

20.46: Half-Time – Absolutely awful. Gerrard doesn’t look fit, they all look as if they going out of their way to not pass to Shaun Wright-Philips, and there is simply no point in having a player like Crouch there on his up front on his own to knock the ball down when there is no-one to knock the ball down to. The delivery from free-kicks has been atrocious and, generally, they’re playing like Notts County – thumping the ball forward for the Croatian defenders to sweep up. They could keep going at this rate for the next twenty-four hours and they won’t score playing like this.

Second Half – Defoe and Beckham on for Barry and Wright-Phillips. He’s going to 4-4-2, but it won’t make any difference. Oh – ha ha ha. I’m sure that the crowd just booed them onto the pitch for the start of the second half.

21.05: Terry Venables watched the first half in the Royal Box, apparently. I’m almost surprised he’s not wearing a crown. Gerrardwatchers might be interested to know that it took one minute and six seconds of the second half before Gerrard to let the ball bounce off his knee.

21.08: England free-kick on the edge of the penalty area, but Beckham’s tame shot is deflected over. Croatia break quickly and England’s defence is presumably still on the edge of the Croatian penalty area, having some sort of tea party. I think that Terry Venables may be constipated.

21.10: Eduardo gets free, and Carson, after hesitating, saves with this feet. The replay indicates that the shot was probably going into the side netting anyway.

21.13: GOAL – England 1-2 Croatia: Terrible penalty decision – Jermaine Defoe was held back by Simunic, but he’d have needed legs like Inspector Gadget to get anywhere near the ball. Notably, it appears to have been given by the referee rather than the linesman. Lampard scores it comfortably.

21.15: It’s starting to open up. Croatia hit the cross bar, and then Carson makes a brilliant save from the resulting corner.

21.20: Olic is put through on goal after another terrible piece of defending by Bridge, but he snatches at the shot and Carson, who is actually starting to visibly grow in confidence, saves. Croatia are about six times as likely to score as England right now, by my reckoning.

21.22: GOAL – England 2-2 Croatia – Oh, bloody hell. Beckham crosses from the right and Crouch, of all people, finally does what he’s paid to do and finishes brilliantly. Croatia had plenty of chances to finish this off at 2-1 and, up to a point, have brought this about themselves.

21.26: Just when you start thinking, “oh, fair play England for coming from two down”, the crowd start singing “God Save The Bloody Queen”, and I want Croatia to score again.

21.33: Croatia, I get the feeling, are starting to just run down the clock a little bit with this match. I still fancy them to sneak a third goal, mind.

21.35: GOAL – England 2-3 Croatia: Croatia were starting to wind down a bit, but Lampard starting throwing himself about in the middle of the pitch. A minute later, Petric curls the ball into the bottom corner from the edge of the penalty area.

21.40: They’re not going to score, England, just in case you were wondering. They’ve had every chance to get back into this, got back into it with a massive slice of luck and still managed to throw it away. They haven’t so much as looked like scoring since. I’m not a believer, but there are wider forces at work here. They’re getting what they deserve in a very profound way.

21.43: Bent gets though and shoots just over. I hadn’t even noticed that he had come on.

21.45: I think that John Motson might be about to burst into tears. “Surely, there’s got to be one more chance, surely. Say something, Mark, say something“. I’m not making this up.

21.49: FULL TIME – England 2-3 Croatia: And that’s your lot. There’s no part of this that England, and the whole money-centric, insular world of English football doesn’t deserve. They have been outplayed by one reasonable and one moderate team, and do not deserve to be amongst the top sixteen in Europe next summer. Even when they got back to 2-2, they still managed to get themselves carved open and throw it away. There was a part of me that, on account of the general bad-minding about England almost wanted them to win but, ultimately, they didn’t deserve it. Now, can we get rid of McClaren, Gerrard, Lampard, Beckham and all the rest of them, forget about trying to win the next World Cup, and start trying to rebuild a team around young players that want to win and that don’t act like the sort of people that you’d want to punch if you ever met them. It won’t be enough to get rid of McClaren, though that would be a start, of sorts. His position, however, is almost certainly untenable. The likes of Brian Barwick, though, should also be considering their positions.

Bad Omens?

Well, no matter which way you look at it, there aren’t many, are there? This will be a quickie, ahead of a live commentary of tonight’s match at Wembley. It’s probably not helping much that I’m watching England’s best international performance on DVD as I write this (the 2001 win in Munich, as if you need ask). Let’s get a couple of things out of the way first: this is by no means a done deal, and any talk of a carve-up between England and Croatia is as much nonsense as the talk of the possibility of Roman Abramovich paying off the home team in last Saturday’s match between Israel and Russia was. Professional footballers are like thoroughbred horses in that respect, although some are more like Red Rum than others, and some are more likely to be headed for the glue factory than others – they are coached for years and years to win. To say that Croatia will turn up tonight and, for some reason, not bother is, frankly, insulting to them.

Before we go any further, here are a few things that I want no mention of in the press or from the crowd during tonight’s match and its inevitable aftermath: I don’t want to hear anything at all about bad luck. England are ludicrously lucky to still be in the competition at all going into tonight’s match. For all the Grade A horse dung that I hear about Beckham’s sending off in St-Etienne in 1998 and Wayne Rooney’s injury in 2004, I can, without breaking into a sweat, give you two or three examples of England being unbelievably lucky. The vast majority of times that England have failed to achieve, they have failed to do so because of their own incompetence. If David Beckham comes on as a substitute and they get a free-kick just outside the penalty area, I will put my foot through the screen if I hear the words “Beckham” and “territory” being used next to each other. I would like to hear the BBC being unbiased tonight (though the chances of that happening are slim to nil) and I would like to not hear any excuses whatsoever about the pitch, or injuries or anything, should they fail tonight. Let me just remind you all of something. England are plenty capable of losing tonight. They have a goalkeeper that has only played about three times at international level, and are playing two players in the midfield who, as we have seen time and time again, cannot play together. This is the culture of English football. If Croatia go a goal up, and with Owen and Rooney injured, I can’t see where an England goal is likely to come from.

Reaching back into the past, there have been many nights like this before this one. The first cut, as former singer and now celebrity Scotland supporter Rod Stewart (who, let us not forget, was born in London now lives and in a tax haven in the Carribbean) once said, is the deepest, and England’s failure in 1973 will still bring a tear to the eye of some men of a certain age. Everybody knows about that night at Wembley against Poland, but the seeds of England’s demise were sown in Chorzow earlier in the year when a poor performance and a 2-0 defeat left them needing a win in their final match rather than just having to avoid defeat in the first place. They were dealt a slightly tough hand in 1978, drawn against the Italians with only one team qualifying and in 1984, no-one even knew that the Denmark team that knocked them out were on their way to becoming one of the top ten teams in the world. Finally, in trying to get to the World Cup finals in 1994, Graham Taylor was dealt a double whammy of being incompetent and having terrible luck. They were unlucky in losing to the Dutch in their final significant match in Rotterdam (cf: Ronald Koeman), but the seeds of this implosion were sown in their failure to beat either Norway or Holland, home or away. Their 2-0 defeat in Oslo remains arguably the worst performance I’ve ever seen by an England team.

Once in the European Championship Finals, there isn’t much by way of good omens to go on either. It’s worth remembering that their 2-0 win against Scotland at Euro 96 was England’s first win in a European Championship Finals match since a meaningless 2-1 win against Spain in Naples sixteen years previously. They failed to qualify in 1984, lost all three matches in 1988 and were knocked out of a relatively weak group in 1992, as well. Since then, there hasn’t been a great deal of improvement. In 2000, they narrowly beat arguably the worst German national team in living memory, but this win was dwarfed by them throwing a two goal lead away against Portugal and throwing away a 2-1 lead against Romania when they only needed a draw to get through to the quarter-finals. For good omens, we could look to Euro 2004. Considering the fortunate run that England had to the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup (when they were dreadful in the group stages, scoring just two goals in three matches, and very lucky against Belgium and Cameroon before, ironically, losing a semi-final against West Germany in which they played their best football of the tournament) and Euro 96 (disjointed against Switzerland and reliant on one last moment of genius from Paul Gascoigne’s flickering flame against Scotland when they should have been pegged back to 1-1 by Gary McAllister’s penalty just seconds before, they then beat Spain on penalties in the quarter-finals while Spain had a perfectly good goal disallowed for offside in extra-time), Euro 2004 was arguably England’s best performance in the finals of a major tournament since 1970. Against France, they should really have been 2-0 up when two late defensive errors gave the French an ill-deserved win. They then followed this up by brushing Switzerland aside in a manner which showed up the 1996 effort against them for what it was and, once in the quarter-finals, had a perfectly good last minute goal disallowed against the hosts, Portugal. If you are looking for good omens for England (and I’m not, to be honest – if they get knocked out, it will be a pretty good thing for English football), then their final group match against Croatia is a pretty good place to start looking. They won 4-2, but the manner of their win was outstanding. After Munich in 2001 and the match against Holland in 1996, it is the third best England performance that I’ve ever seen.

That, though, is where the good omens begin and end, unless you factor in England’s tendency to do just enough to get to the finals of major tournaments. Such a reliance on leaving it to the last minute, though, is, to say the least, living dangerously. That, accompanied with the unabashed mediocrity of the current batch of “stars” leads me to believe that we could be for a night to rival Wembley in 1973 or Rotterdam in 1993. I’ll be back here in about forty minutes bringing you most of the action, less than five minutes after it has actually happened. Ah, the joys of the multi-media age.