England v Switzerland: Fabio Capello's side serve up evidence of why minds remained squarely on the beach
For Wembley’s faithful hordes, the feeling of ‘after the Lord Mayor’s show’ could hardly have been more palpable.
Toothless: Darren Bent provided littel threat for England as the season's football ended with a whimper Photo: ACTION IMAGES
By Oliver Brown
6:45PM BST 04 Jun 2011
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Seven days had passed since Barcelona bedazzled on this stage with as stirring an exhibition of pace, movement and guile as had ever graced a Champions League final.
It had appeared the perfect culmination to the season, the tonic with which to send football-weary players and fans across Europe into a rare tournament-free summer.
But no, we were not finished. There was, alas, still the ordeal of England versus Switzerland to endure: not so much an encore, perhaps, as a needless epilogue.
England, at least, stayed true to type, seizing upon this balmy June evening to demonstrate why their minds remained squarely on the beach rather than the pitch.
John Terry, he of the mile-a-minute platitudes, had claimed the England players would perform all the better for having “a bit of sun on their backs”. Not on this evidence, as the captain’s charges conducted this engagement with all the febrile intensity of a seaside donkey.
This cannot have been what he meant, then, by his impassioned order of one last push. The Swiss, for all England’s dissembling, were not tricky opponents. Had Fabio Capello succeeded in making his men play to anything approaching the sum of their parts, this should have been both an emphatic and restorative win.
Instead, there is still a victory to gain against Montenegro to gain in the small matter of three months’ time. All aboard for Podgorica. A nation holds its breath.
Or rather, it just sighs in weary resignation after another chaotic performance, in which two free-kicks by the wonderfully-named Tranquillo Barnetta caught England’s back line in their own familiar moments of tranquillity.
Rio Ferdinand was positively inert as the first flew over his head, while goalkeeper Joe Hart was scarcely the picture of dynamism as he attempted to keep out the second.
It fell, as it so often does, to Frank Lampard to restore some sanity with a characteristically clinical penalty. But for how much longer?
Lampard has a stronger work ethic than many of his team-mates put together, yet at 33, he does not exactly seem the fulcrum around whom to construct a team for the future.
This is scant reason for Fabio Capello to care. After all, he is leaving once next year’s finals in Poland and Ukraine are over, ready to augment that vast art collection of his. The Italian is motivated solely by building a side to win the European Championships, not one that can endure until the 2014 World Cup.
Capello, in mitigation, had the sense to hook Lampard at half-time, after the midfielder had just fired a wretched free-kick aimed more at the corner flag than the top corner. Into the void strode Ashley Young, one of England’s few assured performers on a day of farcical theatre, to fashion an elegant equaliser.
Would that we could say the same about Young’s side-kick, Darren Bent. The rangy striker underlined the toothlessness of England’s attack when he picked up a loose ball and contrived to miss an open goal by yards. What was that Harry Redknapp said about Bent squandering chances his wife could score?
Perhaps this was the answer. Perhaps Capello should have set out to befuddle Switzerland by sending out an England WAGS XI, with Coleen Rooney leading the line and Christine Bleakley playing the anchor role. They could have created a greater threat up front than Bent and Theo Walcott managed all match.
These truly were the dog days of the English summer. After such a compelling climax to the domestic calendar, and after so satisfying a feast had been served up by Barca and Manchester United, one felt just briefly that Capello and his cohorts had been mercifully forgotten.
If only. The fascination exerted by our national team is rather like a virus: grim, and difficult to suppress. Not one year ago fans draped in the St George’s flag had fulminated at the cameras in South Africa, raging about the dross they had been forced to watch throughout an abject World Cup campaign.
And yet here they were, back again, all 84,000 of them. The same folk who had demanded a refund in Bloemfontein were giving beery renditions of ‘Ing-ur-land’ as if their lives depended on it.
Were you listening, Fabio? Not likely, as he flounced irritably away at the final whistle, unable to stomach a lamentable late miss by Stewart Downing. He should worry: he has two months of luxuriating, before the tantalising prospect of a home friendly against Holland, to purge the frustration.
It is at like moments like this when you begin to understand Guus Hiddink’s exasperation with international coaching. You stoke the anticipation, your players fail to deliver, and then you spend eight weeks working out how to avert the next disappointment.
Surely, there have to be more fulfilling ways to earn to living. Not, we might dare venture, if you happen to be pulling in £6 million a year for it.
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