England must use failure as a spur

IT was the gasp that gave it away. When Nico Kranjcar’s streaky long-range shot bounced off Scott Carson’s chest and skidded into the bottom corner o f his net, it sounded as if Wembley had been winded.

It was also the first indication that 21 November, 2007 was going to be the night when the air was let out of English football.

And who knows if we will ever get our ball back?

England supporters, for all their reputation as hopeless optimists, are used to disappointment. A feeling of festering disenchantment with the national team is an integral strand of the national DNA, a biological trait passed from generation to generation ever since Bobby Moore, Alf Ramsey et al unforgivably gave us reason to dream in the first place.

We resent our over-paid players and their pampered, preening habits; we pillory whichever hopeless buffoon has been handed the dubious honour of coaching them; and don’t even get us started on the Football Association. If ever you need more proof not to trust men in blazers, the game’s governing body provides it by the bucket-load.

But that doesn’t mean we want England to fail. All that is demanded is a basic level of professionalism: an ability to string more than two passes together, a modicum of pride in wearing the shirt and, at the very least, qualification for a major tournament. Nothing drags like a summer stripped of the boozy distraction of seeing Our Boys struggling through to the quarter-finals of a European Championships or World Cup: it has become a proud English tradition, like bungling terror raids or complaining about property prices.

And that is why the 3-2 defeat to Croatia hurt so damn much. It wasn’t that England had failed to achieve their absolute bottom line, but that they had done so with such meek acceptance, such gut-wrenching incompetence. Out-thought, out-fought and out-played in your own backyard, and by a side managed by an earring-sporting part-time rock star. New depths had been plumbed.

But this was no sudden car crash. If losing to Slaven Bilic’s side represented the catastrophic moment of impact, the slide had started long before, probably when the FA decided to reward Sven-Goran Eriksson’s decision to hold talks with Chelsea while still in situ at Soho Square with a bumper pay rise. It was a tacit admission that the international game, once the shimmering pinnacle of footballing achievement, had become cheapened by the inexorable rise of the cash-laden Champions League and Premier League.

After all, if a moderately successful coach like Eriksson had to be paid £4.5million (€6m) a year just to stay in his job, what hope was there? It was a decision which back-fired spectacularly. Eriksson became demotivated, content merely to pick up his eye-watering salary while ensuring England avoided outright embarrassment, and when he was inevitably forced out, the patriotic clamour to appoint an Englishman — rather than the best man for the job — allowed the palpably unqualified Steve McClaren to complete the most rapid, and ill-advised, of promotions. The result was England 2 Croatia 3 and the humbling of a once proud nation.

And yet, amidst all the gloom and despair, there is just the faintest glimmer of hope — the possibility that being sent spinning back to year zero might just shake England out of their self-imposed torpor. Being shown, in such ruthless fashion, how technically and tactically deficient our players and native coaches truly are, even in comparison with a member of international football’s B-list, such as Croatia, is the rudest of wake-up calls, akin to striding into Brian Barwick’s bedroom and banging a saucepan with a spoon.

Now, for once, there can be no excuses: England have no choice but to undertake a radical and sweeping overhaul of their tired, failing system. The process has already started with the appointment of Fabio Capello, a man of genuine stature who will take no nonsense from players who were allowed to drift into a comfort zone under the over-indulgent regimes of Eriksson and McClaren. The Italian will be nobody’s friend: he will keep his distance from his squad, treat the press with thinly-disguised contempt and take a firm line with his employers. He is, in the old-fashioned parlance, a hard bastard. He is also exactly what England need.

But the recruitment of a blue-chip coach should not lull the FA into complacency. The fact that they were forced to look beyond their own borders to find a new figurehead for the national game is a damning indictment of the standard of native coaches and the priority must now surely be to ensure it never happens again.

A central academy needs to be built — in Burton, Buxton or Bermondsey, wherever space can be found — and staffed with the best men and women money can buy.

Trevor Brooking, the current technical director, should be given sole responsibility for its running and be charged with finding and grooming a new English manager by the time Capello quits.

There are candidates — Stuart Pearce, Paul Jewell, Adrian Boothroyd and Steve Bruce could all be in contention, given a fair wind — but they need good teaching.

Above all we need to keep faith. There are fine young players in the Premier League, and not all have been imported from more exotic climes: Joe Hart, Micah Richards, Michael Johnson, Gabriel Agbonlahor, Ashley Young, Aaron Lennon, Wayne Rooney and Theo Walcott already form the basis of a useful squad, so there might be no need to lament the passing of the over-hyped and under-cooked golden generation.

Neither does missing a major tournament necessarily spell disaster. France were notable non-participants in USA 94 and Euro 96 but still won the following World Cup and European Championships.

Failure must be used as a spur: if it is, that bleak night at Wembley might yet come to represent the defining date in the modern history of English football.