Englanders are Jumping off Bridges as I Type
Last night's score from Zagreb...Croatia 2-0 England. The second goal was pretty hilarious. Gary Neville gave a smooth pass right back to goalie Paul Robinson. The ball took a funky bounce just as Robinson was going to hit it and he whiffed. The ball went straight to the back of the net. It's the kind of goal that happens every week on the field I play on in the summers. No one to blame and didn't factor into the result.
The bigger story after the match was the apparent failure of new coach Steve McClaren's 3-5-2 formation. All the papers are screaming about McClaren's job being in jeopardy just a few months after he got it. It all seems a little premature to me. In any sport, it takes some time for players to settle into a new coach and a new system. If you're the FA, you invested a lot of time and effort into searching for this coach, so you've got to stick with your decision for a while, and I'm quite sure they will.
I think in this situation England will have to go down with McClaren's ship. At least, they should stick with him until next spring and see how they're doing. Obviously, if they don't qualify for the Euro Cup, that is an unacceptable failure and McClaren is done. (At this point, American coaches are on that same level: qualify for the World Cup or you're gone. That's how the sport works.) But if they stumble into qualifying, England might benefit from a new man in charge. Bottom line, it'd be insanely counter-productive to fire him in 2006. And they should probably stick with him through the Championship.
As for the 3-5-2 formation, I suppose that should be on a shorter leash. But it's not as though England looked any better in the old 4-4-2. They were equally inept last night on offense. Actually, I kept thinking about the last time Fyall and I did a franchise in FIFA on PlayStation. We had Ashley Cole on our team, and I'd often play 5 midfielders. My mindset was the outer-most midfielders were simply super-aggressive defenders. That's what Cole and Neville were last night. FIFA is such a great game, that Cole was making the exact same runs for England that he did for our Fulham. In the game though, those two outside midfielders would get dead tired very fast and lose effectiveness. I'm not quite sure how realistic that is, but McClaren didn't use his substitutions on either of those boys (even though Ashley Cole was limping on a bad ankle for the last 10 minutes). Something to watch...whether the guys on those wing positions lose their effectiveness as they go.
I think it's a great formation for Ashley Cole, because it encourages his strengths. I'm not sure how well it suits the rest of the gang though. Lampard was playing more forward than the rest of the midfield, as he should, but his slump continues. Rooney was in front of Crouch, mostly, but his slump continues. Scott Parker, to my dismay, was virtually invisible.
Perhaps it's not the formation but simply a matter of the offensive weapons being either in a slump or injured. Joe Cole will rejoin the starting lineup when he's healthy, and I'm sure Andrew Johnson would have seen minutes in this game or the Macedonia match if he had been fit. England's offense has no edge right now. The coach needs to fix that. We'll see if England gives him the time he needs to do it.
The bigger story after the match was the apparent failure of new coach Steve McClaren's 3-5-2 formation. All the papers are screaming about McClaren's job being in jeopardy just a few months after he got it. It all seems a little premature to me. In any sport, it takes some time for players to settle into a new coach and a new system. If you're the FA, you invested a lot of time and effort into searching for this coach, so you've got to stick with your decision for a while, and I'm quite sure they will.
I think in this situation England will have to go down with McClaren's ship. At least, they should stick with him until next spring and see how they're doing. Obviously, if they don't qualify for the Euro Cup, that is an unacceptable failure and McClaren is done. (At this point, American coaches are on that same level: qualify for the World Cup or you're gone. That's how the sport works.) But if they stumble into qualifying, England might benefit from a new man in charge. Bottom line, it'd be insanely counter-productive to fire him in 2006. And they should probably stick with him through the Championship.
As for the 3-5-2 formation, I suppose that should be on a shorter leash. But it's not as though England looked any better in the old 4-4-2. They were equally inept last night on offense. Actually, I kept thinking about the last time Fyall and I did a franchise in FIFA on PlayStation. We had Ashley Cole on our team, and I'd often play 5 midfielders. My mindset was the outer-most midfielders were simply super-aggressive defenders. That's what Cole and Neville were last night. FIFA is such a great game, that Cole was making the exact same runs for England that he did for our Fulham. In the game though, those two outside midfielders would get dead tired very fast and lose effectiveness. I'm not quite sure how realistic that is, but McClaren didn't use his substitutions on either of those boys (even though Ashley Cole was limping on a bad ankle for the last 10 minutes). Something to watch...whether the guys on those wing positions lose their effectiveness as they go.
I think it's a great formation for Ashley Cole, because it encourages his strengths. I'm not sure how well it suits the rest of the gang though. Lampard was playing more forward than the rest of the midfield, as he should, but his slump continues. Rooney was in front of Crouch, mostly, but his slump continues. Scott Parker, to my dismay, was virtually invisible.
Perhaps it's not the formation but simply a matter of the offensive weapons being either in a slump or injured. Joe Cole will rejoin the starting lineup when he's healthy, and I'm sure Andrew Johnson would have seen minutes in this game or the Macedonia match if he had been fit. England's offense has no edge right now. The coach needs to fix that. We'll see if England gives him the time he needs to do it.
posted by Prof. A at 12:05 PM
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