by Nick Holt
Germany won an entertaining third-place match. Thomas Müller showed how much he was missed against Spain with another goal, but the winner came from a less familiar source – it was Sami Khedira’s first goal for his country.
WORLD CUP FINAL No.19
11 July 2010, First National Bank Stadium, Johannesburg; 84,490
Referee: Howard Webb (England)
Coaches: Vicente del Bosque (Spain) & Bert van Marwijk (Holland)
Spain (4–2–2–2): Iker Casillas (Real Madrid); Sergio Ramos (Barcelona), Gerard Piqué (Barcelona), Carles Puyol (Barcelona), Joan Capdevila (Villareal), Sergio Busquets (Barcelona), Xabi Alonso (Real Madrid); Xavi Hernández (Barcelona), Andrés Iniesta (Barcelona); David Villa (Valencia), Pedro Rodríguez (Barcelona). Subs: Jesús Navas (Sevilla) 60m for Pedro; Cesc Fábregas (Arsenal) 87m for Xabi Alonso; Fernando Torres (Liverpool) 106m for Villa
Holland (4–5–1): Maarten Stekelenburg (Ajax); Gregory van der Wiel (Ajax), Johnny Heitinga (Everton), Joris Mathijsen (Hamburg), Giovanni van Bronckhorst (Feyenoord); Arjen Robben (Bayern Munich), Mark van Bommel (Bayern Munich), Wesley Sneijder (Internazionale), Nigel de Jong (Manchester City), Dirk Kuyt (Liverpool); Robin van Persie (Arsenal). Subs: Eljero Elia (Hamburg) 71m for Kuyt; Rafael van der Vaart (Real Madrid) 99m for de Jong; Edson Braafheid (Celtic) 105m for van Bronckhorst
Cautioned: Van Persie (Hol) 15m, Puyol (Spa) 16m, van Bommel (Hol) 22m, Ramos (Spa) 23m, de Jong (Hol) 28m, van Bronckhorst (Hol) 54m, Heitinga (Hol) 57m, Capdevila (Spa) 67m, Robben (Hol) 84m, van der Wiel (Hol) 111m, Mathijsen (Hol) 117m, Iniesta (Spa) 188m, Xavi (Spa) 120m
Dismissed: Heitinga (Hol) 109m (second yellow card)
The Dutch spoiled the final. It’s a simple, bald statement and it’s true. They decided the best way to disrupt Spain was to “get stuck in” to use old-fashioned parlance and this they duly did. Howard Webb, the referee, was criticised in some quarters but when players are clearly putting in crude challenges to hurt and get a reaction from opponents the referee has little choice but to shower cards across the pitch with abandon. The Dutch earned nine yellow cards, two of them to Johnny Heitinga, which condemned him to an early bath. He should have been taking it alongside de Jong and van Bommel, both of whom should have seen red – Webb was culpable in missing de Jong’s high tackle and was lenient with van Bommel, one of the most unpleasantly macho players of the modern era.
Spain weren’t shy of getting a few late numbers in – Sergio Ramos was forgiven one crude lunge after already being booked – and they responded to the provocation with some demeaning gamesmanship.
Football? There was little of it and what there was Spain played. Cesc Fabregas was excellent after coming on for injury-time and it was his intelligent pass that released Andrés Iniesta to score. Iniesta was made Man of the Match but it should have been Piqué for snuffing out the dangerous van Persie. The big disappointment was Robben; faced with Spain’s weakness, Capdevila, left-back of borderline international standard, he offered nothing but petulance.
It was a disappointing end to a disappointing tournament. The best team won but didn’t play their best football – too much of their possession football had no edge or thrust, or foundered on poor control or decision making from Pedro or the struggling Torres.
Team of the Tournament:
Casillas (Spain)
Maxi Pereira (Uruguay) Piqué (Spain) Puyol (Spain) Lahm (Germany)
Xabi Alonso (Spain)
Schweinsteiger (Germany) Sneijder (Holland Müller (Germany)
Forlán (Uruguay) Villa (Spain)
The official team had the media favourites Xavi and Iniesta instead of Xabi Alonso and Müller, and Maicon’s inclusion continued the ridiculous infatuation with over-rated Brazilian full-backs. Sergio Ramos was preferred to Piqué, which is nonsense.
Top scorers: Müller, Sneijder, Villa and Forlán (all scored 5)
Heaven Eleven No.16
Spain
Coach:
Vicente del Bosque – the only man to bring them the World Cup (and it means I can ignore the racist Aragones)
Goalkeepers:
Iker Casillas: captain of the World Cup-winning team and record cap winner
Andoni Zubizarreta: Casillas’ great forerunner
Luis Arconada: and the forerunner of Zubi
Defenders:
Fernando Hierro: ball-playing and goalscoring defender, equally good in holding role
Carlos Puyol: cultured defender, distinctive barnet
Jose Pirri: went back from midfield to sweeper and comfortable in both positions
Gerard Piqué: best defensive centre-half Spain have had
Sergio Ramos: attacking right-back in 2010 team.
José Antonio Camacho: redoubtable ’80s left-back
Rafa Gordillo: could play either side, often used as a wing-back
Miguel Ángel Nadal: in case we need a beast
Midfield & Wide:
Xavi: the man just doesn’t know how to give the ball away
Xabi Alonso: the unheralded one of the three great modern Spanish midfielders
Andres Iniesta: one of the Holy Trinity of the modern Spain midfield
Michel: excellent attacking playmaker in the 1980s
Pep Guardiola: neat, uncomplicated defensive midfielder
Luis Enrique: quality attacking midfielder from the 1990s
Francisco Gento: awesome left-winger in the great Real side of the fifties and sixties
Luis Suárez: talented sixties playmaker, elegant passer and good finisher
Forwards:
Raúl: missed out on the fun in recent years as he ended when they started
David Villa: subtle deep-lying forward or wide man
Emilio Butragueno: the Vulture – Spain’s best striker in the 70s and 80s
Alfredo Di Stéfano: not born in Spain, but played his best stuff there so we’ve let them have him
Likely first XI:
Casillas
Gordillo Puyol Pirri Camacho
Hierro Alonso
Michel Xavi Villa
Di Stéfano
8.5 ENGLAND AT THE WORLD CUP
We do like to gnash and wail and weep and bemoan the disasters that befall our national team. But are we justified?
England’s World Cup efforts read thus:
Year
Stage reached
Beaten by
1950
Group stage
USA
1954
Quarter-final
Uruguay
1958
Group stage play-off
USSR
1962
Quarter-final
Brazil
1966
WINNERS
1970
Quarter-final
West Germany
1974
Did not qualify
1978
Did not qualify
1982
Second group phase
(quarter-final)
n/a
1986
Quarter-final
Argentina
1990
Semi-final
West Germany (penalties)
1994
Did not qualify
1998
Last sixteen
Argentina (penalties)
2002
Quarter-final
Brazil
2006
Quarter-final
Portugal (penalties)
2010
Last sixteen
Germany
It doesn’t take more than the briefest perusal of this list to work out where our place in the scheme of things lies. England are a quarter-final team, so why do we get so upset when we don’t get any further than that, except once in every twenty years or so?
In 1953 Hungary came to Wembley and shattered any perceptions England had that they were among the very best teams in the World. In Budapest the following spring they rubber-stamped that fact with a 7–1 h
ammering, which remains England’s heaviest defeat. Later that year the ease with which Uruguay brushed England aside at the Finals in Switzerland brushed off any final crumbs of delusion.
In the 1950s England were playing catch up. They failed to heed the warning Hungary gave them, remained tactically naïve and over-dependent on skilful wingers (no disrespect to Matthews or Finney, who were sublime footballers).
By 1962 England were a bit more competitive. Jimmy Armfield has gone on record as saying they went to Chile to win the World Cup and were hugely disappointed to lose to the competition’s best side. A case could be made for saying England were the second best team at that tournament but were undone by Garrincha’s genius and Haynes’ inability to translate his own considerable talent to the biggest stage.
Four years later Alf Ramsey synthesised the best English qualities into a team that was the epitome of the mythical bulldog spirit. At its best in adversity, Ramsey’s team had enormous self-belief and grit, and, conveniently, three of the best players to wear the shirt playing simultaneously (Banks, Moore, Bobby Charlton) as well as the cometh-the-hour man teams often need to go deep into a World Cup tournament (Hurst). In 1970 the same team came very close and didn’t get the breaks they got in 1966; they were the best equipped team to cope with an astonishing Brazilian team and gave a memorable performance against them in the group.
Let us gloss over the dark days of the 1970s. English football once more dug a trench and sat in it; resting on the power of its club football, the FA failed to notice that internationally England had fallen behind the rest of Europe and South America. They made a disastrous appointment in the egotistical Don Revie, who tried to build an England in the same mould of his effective but unlovely Leeds United team. The media clamoured for the appointment of Brian Clough, but Clough too suffered from ego, and was prone to perverse selections simply to prove who was in charge.
Ron Greenwood was a safe choice in the late seventies, but he did nothing to advance England tactically; in 1982 a strong squad stumbled through a World Cup and went out without losing a game because they couldn’t / wouldn’t / didn’t gamble. At the time English clubs were pre-eminent; Bob Paisley’s Liverpool team won three consecutive European Cups because they not only injected pace and tempo European sides struggled against, but because they kept hold of the ball. The Liverpool mantra was possession, keep the ball, don’t let the opposition play. England singularly failed to translate this to the international stage. Neither Greenwood nor his successor Bobby Robson had a strong enough personality to stamp a style on England, and some good players never coalesced into anything better than a decent side. Also, England didn’t have a centre-forward worth the name at international level between Hurst and Lineker. The World Cup campaigns of 1982 and 1986 were as good as we had a right to expect.
In the middle of the 1980s Carlos Bilardo introduced three at the back to Argentina and they won the World Cup. No one adopted the tactic for England until Robson was panicked into using it at the 1990 World Cup (when England went one better than their mean exit point).
The system would have suited England down to the ground if they had adapted in the middle of the decade but there was no move to innovate in a land cut off from world football by the ban imposed after Heysel. Sides such as Watford and Wimbledon were enjoying success with direct, long-ball football that suited the English league but was a nonsense in international competition, as Graham Taylor, the former Watford manager who succeeded Robson would discover.
In the middle nineties the FA let the team down in a massive way. Everybody was aware that Terry Venables’ business ventures were not an area where he displayed the soundest judgement, but England let him walk away rather than stand by their man. Given the slack they allowed Sven-Göran Eriksson with his duplicitous private life, their lack of faith in Venables had more to do with cowardice than probity.
Venables’ successor Glenn Hoddle was a gifted coach and tactician, and he was also England’s best manager at thinking on his feet and using substitutes – a vital ingredient to success at international level. Unfortunately he was also a strange man with strange beliefs and he couldn’t keep his trap shut and stick to football. And his man-management was terrible. Still, the exit to Argentina in 1998 was glorious in its way. Then came Kevin Keegan. Keegan was a naïve and loveable comedy turn as a manager, not an international coach.
And so to Sven, who is retrospectively viewed with such distaste. He was an appointment to suit the suits, who probably thought it was good PR and made sound commercial sense. The FA made a series of appointments around the turn of the century far more damaging than that of a Swedish manager. Mark Palios? Pass me that blunderbuss . . .
Eriksson had a good track record and he steered England to two quarter-finals (three if you include Euro 2004); and that was the best we could expect. The generation of players we called The Golden Generation was good, but not as good as we thought, fed nauseous illusions of Premiership supremacy by a media who, to adapt a well-worn cliché, knew the cost of a TV deal but not the value of the game. Eriksson allowed the most talented of them, Steven Gerrard, to play where he wanted not where he was needed. All the time we have kicked up about not having a good holding midfielder, we have had a brilliant player with every tool needed to do that job. Gerrard, with a better (make that stronger) manager, could have been England’s Pirlo. Capello was supposed to be the man with the will to resolve those issues, but he never cared enough. Eriksson and Capello wanted the salary that went with the job, not the job itself. Which is why they only reached the quarter-finals.
England are in a holding pattern. Roy Hodgson probably won’t advance them very much, but they won’t regress either. His first tournament, Euro 2012, was a job well done; with really limited resources and obstinate defending England reached . . . wait for it . . . the quarter-final. Hodgson is an experienced manager at international as well as club level and he has the ability to spot a player who can step up. His selection and use of Ross Barkley in a recent competitive fixture was admirable; the boy clearly has the right stuff and exposing him early in a game that was three quarters won was good management. Eriksson or Capello would have used Carrick; Hodgson didn’t need to see Carrick and Carrick didn’t need half an hour on the pitch to show what he could do. That’s international management.
We have made standard excuses for why England consistently “fail”.
Excuse No.1: England players play too many games. Is that really true? They play no more than they did in 1966 when England won the World Cup at the end of a long season played on mud bath pitches that were far more draining than the lush surfaces used today. The modern game is much quicker, but conditioning and fitness levels have gone up commensurately. And no one plays every game these days in the era of the twenty-man squad. Aston Villa won the league title in 1980 with the same four midfield players in every game. Couldn’t happen today.
Excuse No.2: All the foreigners make it difficult for young English players. That is true, but is used as a smokescreen to hide other faults. English players do emerge, and if a player pushes his way through at one of the bigger clubs it is probably a sign that he has a bit of something about him. The problem isn’t getting players to come through; it is the hoovering up of available talent by the big sides (and greedy agents) and then giving those players time on the pitch that is the problem. James Milner and Gareth Barry were both better players at Aston Villa than they are now, and Manchester City have set Scott Sinclair and Jack Rodwell back years. Just as Joleon Lescott belatedly looked like an England player (he was excellent at Euro 2012) City replaced him and did Serbia a favour. Daniel Sturridge was held back at Chelsea – no one realised he was any good until he went on loan to Bolton, and Josh McEachran is going the same way. Quotas aren’t the answer and they are illegal – don’t let UKIP fool you, EU employment law is vital to commerce as well as human rights and there is no reason why football should be allowed to be an exception, attractive as it may sound purel
y from the perspective of building an England team.
Excuse No.3: The English game is too frenetic and players don’t learn good technique. Well, yes, that is true, but England players have never had basic technique in the way, say, Central European players have, or South American players. England won the World Cup with Nobby Stiles and Jack Charlton in the team – even Sir Geoff wasn’t blessed with the sweetest first touch. And it won’t change, not with an Academy in every city in the country. There are aspects of football ingrained in a nation’s DNA that never change. Things can improve, and probably will, but I very much doubt we will ever produce a generation of ball juggling Brazilian style maestros, just as Brazil will never produce a Frank Lampard. As important as technique is joy. One of the things I most like about Welbeck – and there’s a lot to like, his movement and use of space is way ahead of any other contemporary English attacker, Rooney included – is that he smiles a lot when he plays, he conspicuously enjoys playing football. More like him, please, Mr Academy Director.
Greg Dyke, the new FA Chairman, has made the right noises. As a former head of the BBC Dyke understands the need to create a financially sound environment in which creative people can be left to get on with their job and hopefully flourish. He has set a target – winning the World Cup in 2022. Let’s hope he and the rest of the international team can live up to it. I’m fed up of being a quarter-final team. Here’s to Qatar ’22! (I can’t believe I just typed that . . .)
