Crouching striker, hidden talent

I keep being told that Peter Crouch is surprisingly good on the ground (for a big man). But wasn’t Emile Heskey a great team player (for a striker) and didn’t Nicky Barnby have a surprisingly good left foot (for a right footer)? Crouch was considered among the top two available strikers for England against Austria on Saturday afternoon. This would be funny, if it wasn’t the cold truth. It’s certainly no small feat that the 6ft7in Liverpool target man made the team considering he has yet to score this season. His unorthodox looks and running style make him easy to mock. Arsène Wenger called him a basketball player last season and he was cruelly ridiculed by the crowd for his clumsy play, but he did complement Owen quite well with his famed knock-downs and compared well with the other relative newcomer, Luke Young. With no disrespect to Crouch and Young they are not in the class of Rooney and Neville and maybe more realistic options should have played – Defoe with Carragher at right back. Lampard’s penalty success, after Beckham’s three consecutive misses, was a big help and with Owen sharp the team should easily be capable of picking up their game when it becomes necessary.The pub crowd, powered by the Crouch sized pint-and-a-half beer glasses, seemed happy with the result, though perhaps it was more at the relief of not being Scottish (as in, not having to support their football team). England did after all qualify for the World Cup finals with this result, although necessarily in tandem with Holland beating the Czech Republic, and England can be a side with new impetus when the summer comes.England’s direction seems to have blurred in the last few months. It all had been going well for them since the previous match against Austria. The emergence of Robinson as a reliable goalkeeper has been a relief for fans after the desperate years of Seaman and James, and Joe Cole’s surfacing as an exciting left winger has been comforting, if not ideal.  The loss to Northern Ireland has been dissected to the bone and lessons have been learnt but the Lampard-Gerrard centre-midfield issue does have to be thought about.If both players start displaying the same form as they do for their clubs, England would be driven by goals and searing runs from the middle of the field – before teams could work out a way to stop them without hampering their own style, we would have collected the Jules Rimet trophy and EasyJetted home to celebrate for another 40 years. I love the idea of playing Michael Carrick behind those two, in the Makalele role, and making Lampard and Gerrard the focus of the team in place of Beckham. Beckham plays consistently well for England but gets an unjustly high proportion of the ball and he needs to work out that his crosses (which are effective for the Brazilians at Real Madrid) fly over the heads of Rooney and Owen (though not, admittedly, Crouch). The sending off, however, was clearly quite harsh and the quality of his crossing and set-pieces remain enough for Beckham to retain his place on the team.Dropping Joe Cole to the bench would make the team unbalanced but Gerrard was more inspiring left of the three centre midfielders than when overly burdened with defensive concerns. It worked in the previous World Cup with Nicky Butt, and Carrick is a better player than Butt, though somehow Tottenham team mate (and defender) Ledley King is ahead of him in the pecking order. The next England manager, if there is going to be less of Sven, is a dilemma. The cautious Steve McLaren is as uninspiring as he is tainted with the association of Erikson’s rule.  Desperately, he is currently the 5-4 favourite, and Erikson’s real choice, but there is something to dislike about the toadying inside track he is taking to become ‘the obvious successor.’ Sam Allardyce is a good man but is perhaps too Mike Basset to be the first choice. Someone should put some money on the talented Wenger, realistically an outsider as a foreigner, but he probably needs some support with Paddy Power already paying out on Mourinho’s Chelsea for the league.Despite Saturday’s melodramatic headline in the Guardian – ‘Five days to save a manager’ – this should be a discussion for 2008. We all hope, fortunately with some reason, that Erikson’s England will shine this World Cup – in player terms he believes that he has 10 of the top 50 in the world, and adding Beckham gives a full team that need not be fearful of anyone. Holland, Brazil and Argentina are great to watch but lack England’s all-round strength- I would rather play them than the always-menacing Germany. No comparison to the Ashes is helpful: the World Cup always brings out its own excitement, though it should be noted that Australia are only a play-off away from qualifying…ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005