Friday 2 July 2010

Peter Lorre On Legs



England should immediately disband all Under 21 matches. This team should be the full England team, with maybe a few old heads, willing to stay in the side as the Gary McAllister figure(s). Maybe these 'old' guys might even have a few final hurrahs like McAllister did for Liverpool - Houllier described him as his "most inspirational signing" and you can hardly disagree.

Which old heads? You'd have to ask them; "Hands up, who wants to be the fading star? It really is a better role than you seem to think..."

Or: "Who wants to be the Schweinsteiger?" - they don't have to be literally old.

Next, we should ditch all expectations for at least 2 years. Don't worry about winning. Winning doesn't really seem to help (reference our World Cup qualifying campaign). Forget winning. Winning is overrated.

Insert Karl Popper here.

In retrospect the verification bias after the Croatia matches sent us spinning; sent Capello into an odd mysticism, gave him more self-belief than was required. He knew this at some deep unconscious level, tried admirably to deal with it himself by ditching Walcott at the last minute.

It was just Croatia. It was just Croatia...

Capello saw this coming. He's a good manager. He saw this. But the expectation of England is differently intense to the expectation of Italy or Madrid or whoever. It's expectation tinged with no expectation. We're the best apart from the best.

We're still worrying about never being Brazil even when Brazil don't care about being Brazil.

So...

Let the young uns get thumped a little by the older, more experienced sides (I'm not convinced that experience is that much of a factor anyway at International Level because there's just not enough planning time to get the team together). Let us even fail to qualify for the Euros. Let's instead work on figuring out a way to play before the next World Cup.

Let them find their way around the pitch a little. See who emerges. See where they emerge. Let them make some mistakes (could they make more than the seniors?).

I know our U-21s got fairly roundly beaten by the, er, Germans in the 2009 U-21s final but, hey, who was man of the match?

Yep. Ozil. Petter Lorre on legs.

I think there's something to be learned.

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