Yesterday on twitter I started talking about England teams and the England squad for the World Cup. I'm not sure why because I'm not really that bothered, but there are a lot of things that annoy me about the international game in this country.
When it comes to English football there seems to be a lot of emphasis on Wayne Rooney. A lot of people seem to think he's England's best player, that the team is to be built around him, and that he's the only guaranteed starter out there. Personally, I just don't see it. Rooney's just not that good.
Yesterday I posted this tweet:
With United having a game tonight, I was just going to say jokingly on twitter to keep that tweet in mind when watching them play, but I decided I'd go into a bit more detail about it in a blog instead. When Rooney plays he does exactly what I've said there. He drops deep to pick up the ball, you see him coming back past the half way line sometimes and just taking it off defenders. Then he will play the long diagonal ball out to a winger, then he will make his way to the box to try and get on the end of a cross, then he will repeat this entire process.
When Rooney does this, he is basically rendering the midfield and the attack irrelevant. He is the attacker, so by dropping deep he weakens the attack, and by coming deep and playing the ball long to the wing he is bypassing the midfield. The thing is, if you haven't noticed United aren't actually doing that well this season, and they're taking a lot of stick for their style of play. In the game against Fulham that they drew a lot was made about how the only thing they were doing was crossing the ball. They broke the Premier League record for the amount of crosses in a game. And it's Rooney who is forcing them into this by the way he is playing! But the irony is at the end of the game the United fans say he was the only one who looked interest. So he's making them play shit football but he's the only one who's interested? He just looks interested because he's dropping deep, they see it as him being all over the pitch trying to make things happen, but if he just did the job he was supposed to do in attack there would be a lot more options open to United to play football on the floor through the middle.
United's tactics against Fulham
When it comes to England a lot has been made recently about how they are going to get them to a level where they can realistically compete for the World Cup. Plans are in place, with timescales to be met to get England to the top. Basically what happened was, someone at the FA got paid a lot of money to come up with phrases such as "playing through the thirds" and they used Trevor Brooking to say it in the press to make it legitimate. What you make of ideas like this is up to you, but I think they contradict themselves when they talk about things like this, and they say this is the way they need to get England playing football, but then they make Rooney into their star player. He doesn't play this way at all. Rooney plays football the English way, and that's why English fans like him, but that's why I often describe him as being very average. In England, a pass through the air that travels 40 yards is considered a good ball, whereas in Spain a pass that travels five yards along the ground is considered a good ball. And that's the difference.
I know where this idea of Rooney being a great player came from. When Rooney played his first ever game for England, they cut back to the studio and Gary Lineker said "I think we've found one." And that's all it is. You see, when you get a young player who clearly has talent, it's exciting. But with talented young players, it's the unknown that draws you in. The fact you don't know what they may achieve, what they may be able to do in the future that you haven't seen yet. When I watched Euro 2004 I admit Rooney excited me. He was fearless, he wanted the ball and he'd take on the opposition, and he was scoring goals to boot. I, like everyone else, was thinking this kid could become the best player in the world. But he never did. In my opinion, Rooney has never got any better than he was in 2004. He had one season with United were he scored about 30 goals, but he's never been the same player he was in 2004.
Rooney, Euro 2004
At United Alex Ferguson molded Rooney into a certain type of player. He made him a winner, I won't argue with that, but he took away that fearless desire to run with the ball and take players on that talented young players have. Manchester United under Ferguson was always built on what some might consider an old fashioned style of play, based on wingers and crosses to good finishers. They always had their Giggs or their Beckham or their Ronaldo crossing to their Sheringham or their Cole or their Van Nistelrooy. It's direct. If you look at Ronaldo, he also had that desire to run with the ball taken away from him at United. He was often construed as greedy in his younger years with them. To be fair though, the direct style of play instilled in him by Ferguson has truly helped his game at Madrid. Now he has the freedom again to take men on and run with the ball, but he also has that directness and desire to win he got from Ferguson. But Ronaldo is a more talented player than Rooney.
The English like direct football. It's all well and good talking about implementing a passing game from the back, playing through the thirds as they call it, but I don't know how they'll implement it. If you watch an England game at Wembley, if the centre backs hold on to the ball for more than a few seconds or pass it between themselves the crowd get on their back and they end up panicking and lumping it forward. This is probably down to the fact that most England fans at Wembley support lower league clubs and wouldn't know good football if Lionel Messi nutmegged them with it. You know the type, the ones who said Barca 2011 passed too much.
None of these ever used the phrase "playing through the thirds"
The thing is, England didn't even have to implement a plan to copy the Spanish to become a good team, but they ruined the most dangerous form of England football themselves again by making an average player a star. One of the classic characteristics of English football, made famous by the likes of Sir Stanley Matthews and Sir Tom Finney, is the winger who beats the full back and gets to the byline. However, when England made David Beckham their main man they pretty much eradicated this style of play. Beckham was a great crosser of the ball, and he was a great set piece taker, but he was not a great player. People will disagree with that, but I'm sorry, David Beckham was not a great player. Like Rooney, he was very average. And what Beckham did, like I mentioned before, was cross the ball. He'd cross the ball from anywhere, and providing he had top class strikers in the box it would lead to goals. However, the old fashioned English winger wouldn't cross from anywhere, they would go past the full back then cut it back from the byline. It's a rare sight in football now, a winger getting to the byline and cutting it back, but when it happens it's one of the most dangerous forms of attack that causes panic amongst defences and almost always leads to goals. But we legitimised David Beckham's style of wing play by making him a star, and now crossing the ball is all that's required from an English winger, thus eradicating the traditional English wing play. You rarely even get wingers this days, just right midfielders.
Sir Stanley Matthews, Sir Tom Finney and Johnny Haynes. Three players who probably wouldn't even be stars for England now because of clueless fans
Anyway, I've genuinely forgotten the purpose why I started this blog and I'm not sure I've got anywhere else to take it next, so I'm just going to leave it here. Feel free to pass this on to the FA though if you think they might be interested in what I have to say.
@adamheath
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