Germany no country for old men

AS THE knock-out stage of World Cup 2006 fast approaches, some of the game’s heavyweights are already on the ropes, hoping the bell will give them a reprieve.

One of the lessons of the first round seems to be that, for this month at least, Germany is no country for old men. After Ronaldo’s only marginally improved performance for Brazil against Australia, Zinedine Zidane saw his second outing for France end in the acrimony and disappointment of a 1-1 draw with South Korea, the petulant push which earned him a yellow card ruling the great man out of France’s final group game against Togo.

Two former world players of the year, representing the countries which won the last two World Cups, the apparently terminal decline of Big Ron and Zizou has not been pleasant to watch. Although both may yet get the opportunity to make amends, you wouldn’t want to be betting your last euro on it.

Mind you, Big Ron has taken so much flak at this stage that you’d love if he now went mad and scored a hat-trick. The latest cruel gag at his expense comes from the ever lively Football 365 website which quotes from a live text report of Sunday’s game in Munich: “49 minutes. Goal – Adriano drills a low drive beyond the outstretched arm of Schwarzer from the edge of the area after Ronaldinho feeds Ronaldo.” As F365 points out: no wonder it took so long.

While Zidane and Ronaldo struggle to recover past glories, David Beckham’s is a slightly different case, in the sense that his reputation as one of the game’s galacticos was always rooted more in hype than reality. Yet, as England head to Cologne today to play Sweden in a game which will determine where they are placed in the last 16, I would refrain from joining those — among them 1966 hero George Cohen — who are calling for the England captain to be consigned to the bench.

These days, Beckham’s contribution throughout any given 90 minutes may be severely limited but on the odd occasion when he does do his thing — perhaps, now, his only thing — the impact is significant. Of England’s three goals in the tournament to date, two have come on the end of a perfect Beckham delivery, the first the own goal which saw off Paraguay, the second the cross which Peter Crouch converted to break the hearts of Trinidad & Tobago.

Of course, such reliance on what, in America, would be regarded as specialist field kicking duties, says more about England’s crippling deficiencies elsewhere than it does about the positive remnants of Beckham’s fading grandeur. But even in this country for young men, like Kaka, Robinho, Robben, Rosicky and most of the Argentinian team, for Sven Goran Eriksson to turn to the exciting Aaron Lennon to provide some pace on the flanks from the start, might be to ask a little too much too soon of the Spurs 19 year old.

Whether the same caution should be applied to Wayne Rooney remains to be seen. The issue isn’t one of ability but fitness, of course, and today’s game against Sweden is set to answer some fascinating questions on that score. So much hope is now being placed in Rooney’s transformative powers — not to mention his powers of recovery — that it would be no surprise if he entered the field of play today via a telephone box and wearing the full Superman strip.

Still, at least England are here and will be for another few days at least. By contrast, watching France and Switzerland struggle in this tournament, one can’t help thinking that it was perhaps a blessing in disguise that Ireland failed to qualify. And observing Zidane railing against the dying of the light, one suspects too that Roy Keane might think it something of a relief that he didn’t, in the end, manage one last World Cup hurrah. Of course, that’s all ancient history now. For the Irish, one eye is on this World Cup and another on the upcoming European Championship qualifiers — Steve Staunton has already been out here to see the Czech Republic in action and is back in Berlin today to cast an eye over Germany against Ecuador.

Meanwhile, the English media’s love-hate relationship with their boys has so far produced a fair to middling range of headlines, including ‘Goodness Gracious Late Balls Of Fire’ (after Trinidad) and, ahead of today’s game against Sweden, ‘You’ll Never Walk Cologne’. (Presumably, if it all goes horribly wrong, as it may very well do, we’ll get something along the lines of ‘Eau! What A Stinker’).

All of which serves to remind me of the perfectly good headline that never was. Back at the height of Italia 90 mania in Ireland, I was working in Hot Press, a magazine liberally populated with football nuts, the kind of place, indeed, where a heartfelt tree-hugging piece about humanity’s environmental rape of the Amazon could appear in print beneath the headline, ‘Man Utd 1 Forest 0’.

One day during that memorable World Cup summer, my colleague Jackie Hayden — yes, please blame him — approached me with what he claimed was a strikingly original idea for a feature: after all the fuss had died down, we would commission a piece wherein Jack Charlton would engage in a round table discussion with members of Brendan Behan’s family, in the course of which they would discuss sport as a symbol of national identity, among many other issues of the day.

I heard Jackie out in mystified silence and finally asked the only question worth asking: why on earth would we want to do that?

“Because,” he replied, a terrifying gleam of triumph shining in his eyes, “that way we could use the headline, ‘Jack And The Behans Talk’.”