This is the first time I've blogged fourfourtwo or anyone for for that matter, but tonights game has driven me to say something outside the pub. England/Kazakhstan should, on paper, be an easy three points. The 5-1 scoreline suggests that England were easy winners, but the true story is something completely different. It is a story of World Cup upset and disappointment.
The visitors were a group of international unknowns, yet for 50 minutes they came to Wembley and matched us. In other, higher altitude, games we would have been ripped apart. Pick any of the top twenty coutries and any one of them would have put us to bed by 60 minutes. If England continue to use the the same insane system that they have regularly used for the past 6 years we, as England supporters, have nothing but disappointment in front of us.
Against Croatia we were nothing short of awesome. A lot of the press have put that down to Theo's performance, but the game and its result was down to a lot more than Walcott realising his international potential. Basically what the result came down to was luck.
I'm a huge fan of Steven Gerrard. At club level he is arguably the best attacking midfielder this country has ever produced, but when he has the Three Lions beating against his chest he has yet to reproduce the form that has put him on the international stage. So, Croatia and luck. Gerrard was unavailable for that game so the centre of midfield was a straightforwad set-up of Lampard and Barry. Lampard is the forward thinking player while Barry is the 'libero'. We have an ambundance of wide players who are more than capable of doing a job (Cole, SWP, Downing, Beckham) at this level with the support of excellent wing backs. So why do we have the need to occupy Gerrard in the starting eleven? It just throws the balance of the entire team into dissarray. Against Croatia Rooney had the 'hole' position, and in my opinion he was a revelation. With Gerrard in the first team, though, Rooney was sent wide and this totally negated his strengths. At Wembley tonight the ball was funnelled through Walcott, who had another good game, but this made our attacking options predictable and therefore relatively easy to manage. Once SWP and later Beckham came on the balance of our attacking system was restored. Great. Then, though, the Kazahks scored and this was purely because the player wasn't tracked by his counerpart midfielder (Barry was subbed).
In short I have absolutely no idea why every England manager in the Gerrard/Lampard era see's it as is duty to force the point that these two players can occupy the same pitch at the same time. They can't. THEY CAN'T. It throws the balance of the entire team out and it transforms a world beating eleven into a bunch of chasers. Three of the goals tonight came from set-pieces against a team of nobody's. Its just not viable.
Its not that I want to drop Gerrard, but Lampard is the more productive player at international level. Check OPTA, its true. Stevie G is, at the moment, a great player to have on the bench, but put him on with Lampard from the start and we will be in for a very disappointing World Cup. The players we have at the moment, in a league that is dominating Europe, deserve more than to be screwed by a system that is trying to force the impossible.
My starting midfield? (In the classic 442 formation) - Beckham, Barry, Lampard, Cole (with Gerrard, SWP, Carrick, Downing and Hargreaves on the bench). Sounds lovely, doesn't it!!!
I've always been impressed by Cappello's strategies and I truly hope that tonight was more about the injury to Joe Cole than it was of Capello's committment to fixing the Gerrard/Lampard issue. It wont be fixed because it was never intact.