It’s Thursday, like it or not
There was an England match last night, but it was a friendly so not really worth watching closely. The bare facts are that McLaren played a 4-3-3, Wayne Rooney scored, then Holland scored late on.
The 4-3-3 seemed to open up more space for our exciting trio of midfielders. Gerrard was everywhere, Carrick played some tidy passes, and according to team sheets, newspapers and the internet, Frank Lampard was also on the field. You just wouldn’t necessarily have known by watching the game, but hey, you can’t drop someone who was playing really well two years ago can you? They might turn good again any day now or something. Form is temporary, class is permanent, they say. But what if Frank Lampard just enjoyed two great years in which he played above himself? What if that was the exception, and this is the norm? When does he lose his place? Not when he starts playing badly, clearly, because we’re well past that.
There’s been much discussion of Andy Johnson being stuck on the right wing, but this doesn’t interest me. He’s no more an international forward than Fuzzy Bear is, in my view. Being fast is one thing, occasionally scoring goals in the Premiership is fine, but he’s not a predator and he doesn’t make goals for others, and I think he’s out of his depth. We wasted our genuinely good forward generation (Andy Cole had his critics, but the man is a born goalscorer, as we saw on Saturday; even Les Ferdinand would be an England regular at the moment; even Ian Wright might claim to have been hard done by on the cap front) and now we don’t know what to do with what we have. Peter Crouch scores lots of goals, but is tall and makes people nervous because he’s different. Darren Bent appears to have every attribute a forward could ever need, but clearly lacks something in the eyes of England managers. Which leaves us with players like Johnson. Where’s the class? Where’s the natural poacher? Where? Is David Nugent the answer?
What do I care? Last night I had a vision. In it Liam Rosenior was signed by Manchester Utd as Gary Neville’s replacement. He becomes an England regular and we all scratch our heads and wonder what happened.
