From this morning’s Guardian:

“We coaches cannot understand how England, with the players they have, could fail to qualify for the European Championships,” said Capello, who has long been proud of the psychological work he does with his players. “How could players of such a high level perform so differently with their national team to the way they perform with their clubs? It is clear that they suffer a mental block. How else can you explain England getting knocked out? Wearing the England shirt clearly weighs heavily on their shoulders, even though they are champions [with their clubs]. In situations like this, the coach has a fundamental role to play, one that is more psychological than technical or tactical.”

He’s not ruling out technical or tactical issues, but stressing where the heart of the problem lies. I agree. Sport psychology boils down to one principle: externalizing failure. You learn to accept that you are a good, even great, player, but will always make mistakes and fail. These mistakes and failures don’t add up on some internal receipt roll to produce a bottom line of internal, personal, failure. They are what they are, no more, and no reason to doubt yourself or to play without freedom.

I don’t think many of the England side understand that. They care too much. If I make a mistake, it’s not just my team that I’m letting down - it’s my country. I’ll have to wear the white feather.. So do we. Who, in Britain, doesn’t respond to Stuart Pearce here at gut level? “Look at this for character. Time to cleanse his soul..”

The problem is deeper than just that of geeing up the players, or somehow “giving them confidence.” What happens to Pearce there is too personal, too much about him, too self-conscious, to work on a consistent basis. Shearer’s cool, or Owen’s today, is what works. But we don’t love it as much, and don’t recognize its value. Until we do, our players will play with fear and tension. Booing will make it more and make it worse.

If Capello succeeds, he’ll have to convince British fans, not only that it isn’t necessary for players to feel they way they feel in order to succeed, but that players feeling the way they do is actively counterproductive. That’s not likely to happen. Shearer is a front runner purely because men at the FA believe that feeling and passion is key, not skill, tactics, intelligence, coolness under pressure and quick thinking - what Sir Clive Woodward called “TCUP” - “Thinking Correctly Under Pressure.”

Club football success is not the same thing as international success. There’s a language barrier, and the deeper cultural problems to overcome. And Capello is a defensive manager, which isn’t necessarily what we need right now. Perhaps he sees defence in a positive light, as a craft and skill, to be performed with its own aplomb, not as a shameful retreat. Should Capello take the job, there are reasons for optimism:

AC Milan, in the 1994 Champions League Final:

Roma’s first Scudetto in a decade:

A Juventus Scudetto:

Capello makes better of his Beckham mistake than McClaren:

If he does it with England, though, he’ll have done it with English players. He seems to rate them. Perhaps he can.

I guarantee one thing. If he isn’t appointed, we’ll always be wondering what might have been.

I’ve long fought against the idea that England’s top players are arrogant primadonnas who think they have a divine right to a
place in the national team. I’ve even resisted, from time to time, the idea that the English way of playing is irretrievably backward.

But the evidence of this clip is overwhelming. From 45 seconds to 2 minutes 20 seconds. He needs taking down a peg or two..

What we need is a return to old values and a complete change in our approach to playing football. At the same time as returning the game to its working class roots and bringing in foreign expertise. As Sir Geoff Thompson said, we have no right to a place at the top tournaments, and we should expect to be qualifying. (I’m being tongue in cheek. But seriously, in the light of Alan Shearer being seriously touted for the job at the FA - something he has treated in exactly the right spirit in my opinion - do we really think that anyone knows what to do to change things anymore? Or, on the other hand, that we’re going to get some perspective, calm down, and begin to enjoy our international football again? War is over if you want it, people, even if it’s only a footballing proxy).

He left with such grace, patriotism and politeness. The manner of Steve McClaren’s departure would make a proper Englishman proud, but there were none of those in the press conference.

I felt it was an error to let Ericksson go; now, here we are again amidst the tangled deckchairs as iceberg after iceberg slips through our weakened defence. If you see what I mean.

Last time, the following were the considerations:

1. Only an English manager “understood” English players; only an English manager could “inspire” them.
2. We needed a good old-fashioned English captain to gee up the players.
3. The players were desperate to show their passion and commitment and needed someone on the touchline who would yell things and dance about like a puppet for this to happen.
4. The players were also a bunch of primadonnas who didn’t care. Who were being let down by a cautious foreign manager.
5. Beckham should go. “Bring in,” on some kind of footballing forklift truck, SWP, Aaron Lennon, etc. Ditto Andy Johnson, Jermaine Defoe; Michael Owen is past it.

You can tell from my tone what I think about all of that.

I’m still not sure that the real problems of the job are understood.

1. International management is different in nature from club management, and success in club management does not run on automatically into success as an international coach. There are a number of “specialist” international coaches who manage country after country, rarely dipping into club management at all.
2. An international manager, especially in the UK, does not have much time with his players, and long-term team-building skills are therefore difficult to apply.
3. There is no transfer market in international football; an international manager has to do with what he has, and is rather more at the mercy of form and injury than he would be at a top Premiership club.

What this points towards is the appointment of someone capable of making a quick impact. There have been a fair few good “impact managers” in Britain in the last forty years. Brian Clough was not one of them: his teams took a good two years to get into gear. The greatest impact manager of all time was this man:

(There are three parts to this. Let’s forget current woes for a moment…)

Jock Stein managed three club sides, and won cups with two of them within six weeks of taking over. His first trophy at his other club took him entire months to achieve.

Arsene Wenger is another manager with a track record of quick results. He won the French League in his first year in charge of AS Monaco, and a League/Cup double in his second full season at Arsenal. Wenger is thought to have a very good idea of how to create a successful international structure within the existing set-up of English football, and is one of few men to have an optimistic view regarding young English players in the club academies. He is not interested in the job.

Perhaps the best candidate - on these terms - is Jose Mourinho. He is rumoured to have promised Frank Lampard an England team built around him should the job come Mourinho’s way. In his first season at Uniao de Leiria, he took them to their highest ever position, and within 18 months of joining Porto had won the Portuguese league title with a record points score. UEFA and Champions League success followed. His first season at Chelsea was marked by a runaway success in the Premiership, a League Cup, a Champions League semi-final and a famously brave exit from the FA Cup.

Fabio Capello has won league titles with every team he has ever managed, twice on two separate occasions in the case of Real Madrid. Only at AS Roma did he fail to achieve league title success in his first season in charge - that took him a full eighteen months. Given that he is actually interested in the job - a thing of wonder in itself - these are good signs. Less good is his devotion, latterly, to defensive, cautious football. England have a problem with fear - and have had since the breakup of the second great Alf Ramsey side in ‘71-2. I doubt this is what we need.

Whoever takes over has one initial duty to fulfil. David Beckham has been left stranded on 99 caps. After his patient, professional and patriotic reaction to being dropped by McClaren, plus his wonderful first-time pass onto the chest of Peter Crouch leading to Wednesday night’s wonderful equalizer, he is owed his century. And an ovation to follow it. It’s a matter of deciding what kind of footballing country we are - either thuggish, stupid and lingeringly homophobic, or capable of recognising when talent’s among us, recognising when that talent has done its best for us in frequently outrageously ungrateful circumstances.

Herbert Chapman’s teams won six League Championships and two FA Cups in the days when that was all that a team could win. Yet he went into print to say that he felt league-style competition was ruining the game.

The pressure on a team to win, he argued, militated against the team’s ability to entertain and against its players’ opportunities to become better footballers.

Chapman was looking to start an argument. I don’t believe for a minute that he wanted the Football League dismantled after forty years in favour of an endless series of meaningless Harlem Globetrotters-style exhibition matches leavened with the odd Home International and Cup tie. In fact, it’s hard to see how football could have had the impact it had without the discipline and shape of league structures. And think - no more crunch games, no more miraculous escapes from relegation or last-gasp title-clinchers..

Nevertheless the same choice between “success now” and longer-term development faces every manager and coach. It’s on a slightly smaller scale, but it’s there nonetheless.

Arsene Wenger has rebuilt Arsenal over the last two to three seasons. The players coming in have required time to bed down, to find their feet, to get used to playing with each other. They’ve had that - but they had to manage it at the same time as securing the club’s financial position by finishing in the top four of the Premiership.

Billy Davies at Derby probably has a long-term vision for his side, and would love a run of say, 60 games, plus two or three transfer windows, to start pulling it together, whilst building a youth set-up at the same time. Some hope. Instead, he has no choice but to put a side together that has some chance of clawing its way out of relegation trouble. Unless the Derby board are unusually far-sighted, or, like Watford’s, happy to be a boomerang club, he can forget about having room to build for the long term.

The same problem exists further down the scale. Tony Cascarino has begun a footballing agony-uncle column in the Times, and here’s an exchange from his first post:

My coach keeps banging on about us “working on our shape” in training but half the lads can’t even trap a ball. What’s more important for us to concentrate on during training nights: teamwork or individual ball skills?

TC: Teamwork. You can practice ball skills all you like but if your natural talent is limited, there’s only so much improvement you can make. But the potential to improve tactically is huge. You see from the professional game how much of a difference being organised can make, even when a team is inferior. What’s most important of all is that you enjoy training and matches, because if what you’re doing seems like a chore, it’s not doing you much good. Structure training so it’s fun, whatever you do during it.

You can only nod at that. If I were called into a dressing-room and asked to “do something” about the team’s confidence, I’d reckon to take the best part of 3-6 months, working most days. But I’d be required, most probably, to have something to show within days or weeks. In 6 months, the team might be down, the manager gone, the board selling up.

Not every manager will succeed given unlimited time. It does seem to be something of a principle - the very best managers, the Steins, are able to organize instantly, getting improvements now, AND thus win time to build for the future AND know precisely how they were going to do it. Clough and Taylor went into Derby County with a blueprint for success (their phrase, and I don’t think it’s one made up in hindsight) but pulled something workable together in a couple of weeks.

Translated to England level, the task begins to look impossible. As England boss, organize is about all you have time to do. But the unique pressures of the situation, seen down many years in panicked English defending-deep, require something more. But how on earth do you provide it?

At club level, there are many ways in which you can take pressure off your players. You can grab the headlines. You can distract them, keep them laughing, keep them on their toes with the unexpected, and so on and so forth. Perhaps you can do it at international level. But no one’s succeeded for forty years.

Not even Terry Venables. Most of the Youtube coverage of Euro ‘96 focusses on Gazza’s goal, Seaman’s penalty saves, the Holland match, and poor Gareth Southgate. There’s no clip of what England did after their early goal against Germany in the semi-final, but if you remember, we immediately sat back to defend on the edge of our area. With the inevitable results. It’s all too visible in the German equalizer here:

I’d gone to Blackwells - the old Broad Street one, using the original narrow entrance in preference to the wider swing doors - to get something second-hand from their top-floor department. It was mildly annoying to have to shoulder my way in - blast these tourists, coming in to gawp - and slightly more annoying to find nothing worth the money after the long trek upstairs. I fretted my way back down. The ground floor was even thicker with people by this stage, as if coaches were offloading directly into the new fiction section. I pushed my way through, trying to stay this side of politeness, but my temper frayed altogether when I found the entrance blocked by a wall of suits. I pulled them aside, got through to the door, which opened in front of me: Muhammed Ali stepped through it, and shook my hand. The room erupted into applause.

The next day I caddied in a competition featuring Henry Cooper.

I’ve never really wanted to meet sportsmen. Those competition prizes - a day at Highbury, a coaching session at your school with Phil Neal or whatever - left me cold as a boy. Sam Tyler meets Bobby Charlton in a nightclub in “Life On Mars” (surely a continuity error) and fawns. I couldn’t do that.

There is always an exception to the rule, and my exception is Sir Tom Finney. Finney - brilliantly talented, intelligent, interested in his sport’s development, but trapped by maximum wage, retain-and-transfer, the decrepit state of significant sections of English football in the 1950s - exemplifies both what is fantastic about our national game and what is frustrating and self-defeating about it.

And there are other men who I would have liked to have interviewed. But they are all dead. Fred Pentland, English coach of the first foreign side to beat England. Jimmy Hogan, Hugo Meisl. Jack Reynolds, the father of Ajax, who was interned with P.G. Wodehouse during World War II. Herbert Chapman, of course. Sepp Herberger. Clough was famously uninterviewable, but left one of the great autobiographies behind him.

It’s a list that speaks for itself of our next reason why English managers don’t come across as well as their foreign counterparts.

The most intelligent English managers work abroad

Today, Stuart Baxter at Helsingborgs; yesterday, El Tel, Roy Hodgson, and the others in the long ago. In the period 1905-1939, it is as if only Herbert Chapman stayed, and his project, the creation of a great metropolitan London side, was something no one had seriously attempted before. There was good reason why this was so. Norman Fox writes of Jimmy Hogan:

He soon realised that the continental players had a different attitude from those in England. They said it was up to them to get themselves fit, what they expected of the coach was not the typical British notion that stamina would win in the end and that being deprived of the ball all week would make them all the more hungry for it on Saturday. They demanded to know how to improve their ball skills and how to use them to produce effective teamwork.

Stuart Homfray adds:

He took over at Fulham in August 1934, but the players disliked his ‘unconventional’ training methods (he actually used a ball) and tactics, and there were many complaints about his style from the more established players. After 31 games, Hogan was sacked whilst recovering from an operation in hospital - the board stating that “seasoned professionals did not need coaching.”

Time and time again in the biographies of these pioneers you find the phrase “Scottish passing game” and “English long ball game.” It’s repetitive and deeply depressing.

The Tradition of the English Professional

We saw in Part One of this post that Edwardian football did not have the large pool of ex-players to draw upon for management - the game simply hadn’t been around long enough to generate it. In any case, it was felt - and not unreasonably - that the players themselves were the experts at playing. That Herbert Chapman thought different did not make him a pioneer in England - it made him that very English thing, a man admired and looked up to, but not emulated.

The professionals were experts enough to beat everything foreign that came their way for a very long time - England didn’t lose to continental opposition until as late as 1929. In such circumstances, isn’t it forgiveable to suppose that the English way continued to be the best? Where was the evidence to the contrary? When a casually-thrown-together England team appointed by amateur non-players could see off hyper-motivated “World Champions” Italy, or defeat the Master Race in its rats nest in Berlin?

Where no demand is felt, none exists. The tradition - that the players, the professionals are the experts at playing, had fifty years free to set in cement before 1953 and the defeat to Hungary first cast real doubt on it.

Even the pioneers working abroad took some of it in with their mother’s milk. Jimmy Hogan, late in life, said:

I am a British coach. I still maintain that we have the best players, but it is our style of playing the game that has gone wrong.

The Creation of a Coaching Tradition Abroad

Men like Hogan were in demand abroad because between 1890 and World War One the fabulous game of football went around the world faster than cigarettes. In Europe, and in South America, the great twentieth century kickabout was getting underway. The new clubs in Austria, Germany, Hungary, Brazil, Argentina, Spain and Italy wanted to build their own footballing rockets - and the British, especially the English, were the footballing rocket scientists. We were the incorruptible referees, too.

From the point of view of these new foreign clubs, football was something for them to learn. The great unspoken project, “catch up with the British” (there were Scottish coaches abroad too) took fifty years. In pure technical and tactical terms, it took thirty - but the formidable psychological lead of the English and Scots took longer to break down. It was 1931 before Scotland lost an international against foreign opposition. They did it in style, going down 5-0 to the Wunderteam of Meisl, Sindelar and a certain Jimmy Hogan.. and followed it up four days later with a 3-0 defeat to Italy. But for those men it must still have been a wonderful holiday, in a Europe not yet scarred by Nazism and renewed war. Were the defeated Scots the very best side available, and were they sober?

In some countries, football slotted into an existing club tradition. Many German sporting clubs, famous for football now, offered tuition and participation in a wide range of sports such as they were in the nineteenth century. The idea of teaching a game, of coaching, was transplanted into football in these clubs in a way that didn’t happen in Britain.

Catching up with Britain was a considerable task. There were just so many people playing football in Britain that, even without ideas of coaching or an emphasis on ball skills, we enjoyed a steady flow of truly wonderful players that countries with less of a grass-roots base simply didn’t enjoy. The strength and resilience of our club structure, built in a comparatively uncorrupt sporting and business culture, in a famously unviolent social milieu, was almost impossible to emulate, and this remains the case to this day.

The sheer size of the task gave it its drive. Even now, and deny it as some countries do, beating England is a relatively rare peak experience for our rivals.

In England, in Italy, in Germany, Brazil, Spain, and Portugal, the vast majority of coaches and managers today are, as you’d expect, former players. Our former players have come from a tradition in which the player is the expert at playing, a tradition long suspicious of coaching per se. Abroad, coaching was part of their game by necessity from the very beginning - it’s not an alien import or an insult. In Italy, there is a college devoted just to training potential coaches and managers. That there is a need for tactical knowledge, and physical training expertise, that these approaches can be improved upon and developed, are as much part of the tradition abroad as “passion and commitment” is to ours.

So when an “untested” top continental player becomes a manager or coach - like Beckenbauer, or Marco Van Basten, or Luca Vialli, or Ruud Gullit - that player is steeped in a coaching tradition and has thrived within it. Some players making the step up, like Jurgen Klinsmann, appear untested but, as in Klinsmann’s case, have been studying modern coaching on their own account for some time.

Something more than raw talent is required for success in a coaching football culture. Within a more cerebral culture, the more cerebral thrive. It’s why there’ve been so many great Scottish managers compared to English; it’s why the best English managers were considered nuisances as players.

The Problem of Translation

Some balance now. How many managers working in England now can you name? I can come up with 40-50 without the need for Google, and you can probably manage the same or more. But how many managers can you name who are working in the domestic Dutch game? Or the French? Or the German? Or the Italian? Or the Spanish? Let alone the Greek, or the Portuguese. Don’t even mention South America, where naming more than 10 clubs in the entire continent is a challenge.

Our impression that foreign managers are more intelligent than their English counterparts is probably based on a kind of fact, as I’ve been discussing here. But it’s important to realize that we’ve built up that initial impression, and taken that basic idea, from a tiny sample. A tiny sample that, by and large, has taken the time learn English, a considerable intellectual task.

My personal list of the greatest managers in the game’s history runs: Hogan, Chapman, Meisl, Pozzo, Busby, Stein, Clough, Revie, Paisley, Herberger, Schon, Michels, Beckenbauer, Ferguson, Mourinho. What a mixture of Wikipedia, archive footage, hindsight and conventional thinking it is too. I don’t claim any special insight for it. I’m not aware that Sepp Herberger spoke English, but all the others did, even the English ones.

The English-speaking foreign managers come across well to us, then - but what are the others like? I’ll have to learn languages to find out.

Is It All Changing?

There are strong rumours, some of them coming from the mouth of Arsene Wenger, that there is a new generation of young English footballers coming through the Academies whose training has been very different from that of their predecessors. (Set that against the more pessimistic views of Sir Trevor Brooking and myself).

There are new approaches being applied - and the new approaches are English. Step forward Simon Clifford.

Alex Ferguson’s “sons” are spreading out through the British management world, and are showing signs of turning the whole thing inside out. Mark Hughes, Paul Ince (now succeeding at his second club), Roy Keane (happily prepared to talk us through his learning curve stage by stage), Alex McLeish, Gordon Strachan (who’d probably deny the influence until he’s blue in face as well as in the veins). Steve Bruce. More are on their way.

There’s even the remnants of a Jimmy Hogan line of descent in the Premiership. Steve Coppell, at Reading, played under Ron Atkinson, who names Hogan as a major influence. I admit that’s a weak link, as I can’t honestly see a trace of Hogan in the Big Ron approach.

Robsons, Sounesses, Megsons and their ilk still rattle around the English management scene. But perhaps the future now lies, not with the ex-lads of old, but in the enthusiasts for learning and growth, the Boothroyds and the Allardyces and the Keanes, who have seen proper management and seen proper coaching and seek to learn how to do it themselves.

English players have undoubtedly raised their game in the face of foreign competition in the Premiership. It’s meant something of a cull - English players aren’t the majority in the Premiership now. But what survives is there on merit. Is the same now happening to management?

What do you think? These have been speculative posts - what’s your take? Let me know in the comments.

It’s like that first real drink of the evening, England going out of a tournament.

All of that tension falls off your shoulders and the world rights itself. We hardly knew how bad we’d been feeling until it was over.

And the football suddenly gets better. Remember Euro 2000? I caught this one in the Hand in Hand in Wimbledon, and fell in love with the game all over again. A real Golden Generation’s golden moment:

When no home nations make it, you can forget all the worry about winning and just enjoy the football. England missed Euro 1984 too. France didn’t:

There’s still time for many of these England players. Not for Lampard, who will be 33 come the next World Cup. But Rooney, Defoe, Crouch, Barry, Gerrard, the Cole brothers, Owen and co. will be around. England weren’t at the 1994 World Cup, but here is the ‘94 game in which Roger Milla, at 42, became the oldest player to appear and score in a Finals match:

After ten years in the South London/Surrey borders, I’ve overdosed on White Van Man and won’t miss what would have been the inevitable revival of the debate about the carrying of plastic St George flags. But I’m sorry for Steve McClaren. He’d just found his feet in that most difficult of jobs. But at least he’s spared the even more appalling spotlight that comes with tournament finals.

Another drink, anyone? And maybe a trip out of town..

There have been quite a few histories of the England team in recent years - before this one, we had James Corbett’s England Expects, and every tournament that the side qualifies for generates more of the same. Most of them are frustrating cut-and-paste jobs, that leave you knowing what the results were and what kind of performance was generated, without their possessing any particular depth. It’s a merciless, cynical genre, and a populist one, making sure never to venture too far away from common opinion in that usual childish, cowardly, late-macho manner common to modern British football.

Brian Glanville has been around as a journalist long enough to ensure that if his book is cut-and-paste, they are at least his own cuttings. And if his book is a long exercise in cynicism and low expectations, they are at least his own, genuinely held opinions. In among them are the real reason for the book - Glanville’s own, illuminating snapshots of memoir. These are frequently marvellous - why is there anything else in the book? A history of England seen entirely through Glanville’s eyes would, on this evidence, be a sporting classic, and this is therefore a missed opportunity. Take this, about England’s pioneering referee and football administrator, Sir Stanley Rous:

..Rous’s support for Winterbottom as England manager was not wholly consistent. In May 1955, when I was living and working in Rome, Jesse Carver, the Liverpudlian who was then managing Roma, one of his many Italian sides, told me that he had an appointment with Rous at the Hotel Quirinale in Via Nazionale and that I might care to come along; it could do me some good.

Rous awaited us, silver haired, formidably tall. ‘Did you have a good journey, Sir Stanley?’ I dutifully asked him.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said, impatiently. ‘Who are you?’

Little interested when I told him, he then proceeded, in my obscure presence, to offer Winterbottom’s managerial job to Carver. ‘It’s about time we brought Walter back into the office,’ he said.

Glanville has fifty years of such tales to tell. I can only wish there were more. Like this:

Ramsey..had no doubts about (Roger Hunt). Before the first leg of the Intercontinental Cup final of 1967 at Hampden Park, between Celtic and Racing Club of Buenos Aires, I found myself having tea, amiably, with Ramsey, in the North British Hotel. We went outside, hoping to catch a taxi to take us to the game. No such luck. Eventually, a somewhat battered blue jalopy full of young Scottish fans drove past and drew up beside us.

‘Och, it’s Sir Alf, get in, get in,’ which we did. The badinage soon began. ‘That England team that won the World Cup! So many poor players!’
‘Well,’ said Sir Alf, as by then he was. ‘For example, who?’
‘That Roger Hunt; he’s a poor player.’
‘Roger Hunt,’ said Ramsey, ’scores twenty-five goals a season, every season. Yes, Roger Hunt’s a poor player!’

It wasn’t always a battered car seat for Glanville. Often, it was a ringside one:

The following morning I emerged from sleeping on a colleague’s chalet floor to be greeted by an alarming sight: Gordon Banks, pale and plainly distressed, staggering across the hotel’s lawn on the arm of the England doctor, Neil Phillips. Food poisoning had affected him and, disastrously for England, put him out of the game. How had it happened, and only to him? Many years later, when I spoke to him about it, Banks insisted that he had eaten and drunk the evening before exactly the same as any other player.

Though it may be merely a wild surmise, it could be worth recording that when the Daily Telegraph reporter Bob Oxby subsequently broke his journey home in Washington to visit his cousin, the well-known Senator Stewart Symington, the senator laughingly told him, ‘That was the CIA! You don’t think we were going to let England beat Brazil, do you? - Brazil at that time being in a state of political turmoil. The mystery may never be solved, but, beyond all doubt, Banks’s illness was fatal for England.

Yet anecdotes of that kind nestle inconspicuously in yards of Monday-morning match reportage. The reportage has reference value, of course, and it is backed up with an excellent appendix - the best of its kind I’ve seen - containing full details of every post-War England match. So if you don’t own an England history, and want all of the figures at your disposal, this is the one to go for.

Glanville concentrates on short-term causes - he is a veteran journalist, not a historian, and tactics, selection, luck and the “impossibility” of the job are his principal explanatory tools. His characterization of the successive managers is as brief and constrictive as that might suggest: Ramsey good, Ericksson bad; Winterbottom couldn’t talk to players (but Glanville does correct one common error in pointing out that Walter had indeed had full-time top-level playing experience for Manchester United); Robson frightened and unadventurous; Greenwood good but too old; Hoddle an occasionally effective enigma. Taylor and McClaren are roped together. Glanville does possess two interesting opinions - he doesn’t rate Clough as a potential England boss, and he feels that Venables came to the job too late:

While at Chelsea, as a teenager, he (Venables) astonished his future co-writer, Gordon Williams, deputed to teach the club’s youngsters English language classes. Asked to write a short story, Terry alone complied, and came back with a tale reminiscent of the famous American writer, Damon Runyon. When Williams evoked the comparison, Venables replied that he had never heard of Runyon.

And as for Clough:

The patriot cry for Brian Clough and Peter Taylor goes up every time England lose a match, but what guarantee is there that the methods which have worked so well at club level would be effective in the international field? Peter Taylor’s book on Clough made it perfectly clear what many of us had known all along, that they are an authoritarian couple, ruling essentially by fear. Between the wars, in the days of the illustrious and commanding Arsenal manager, Herbert Chapman, the fear was of unemployment. Today, though we have unemployment again, the fear is of losing the huge rewards which clubs like Forest can provide. No such hold could be established over international players. Treat them peremptorily, and they would certainly rebel.

(A misapprehended view of Taylor’s book and quite unlike the way either Chapman or Clough actually operated when they were successful - but there it is).

Glanville has written a useful book and one with a few glorious stories - too few - thrown in. But although he tells you what happened, he doesn’t tell you why. Why, for instance, did England turn from being the stupendously innovative footballing nation of 1860-1905 to the incurious career-catchers-up that they’ve been ever since? Why is our international team so unrepresentative of an intelligent, inventive, original and eccentric country? Why, after all but sixty years of (mostly) falling short has there never been any sustained effort to regain a lead over the world? Or even any idea of one?

There are real answers to all of these questions in the history, culture, psychology and personality of the game. But they’re not in Glanville’s book. Or, as yet, in any other.

For the second match in succession, this was a little more like it. England played as a team, kept their shape throughout the game, and overcame their individual weaknesses to close Israel out and edge towards Euro 2008 qualification.

Let’s get some reservations out of the way: England’s passing lacked any real confidence. Waddle’s observation from earlier in the year that England will only pass to a man in three metres of space still applies. There was plenty of loose long-ball stuff around. Stronger opposition would have presented far more of a challenge.

But Israel’s challenge was prevented from showing itself because of the way England, and in particular Gerrard and Barry, played. England made their opponents’ performance poor. That hasn’t happened in quite some time.

I’ve had the sense for a while that the worst is over, for England, and this match strengthened it.

First of all, Steve McClaren has dustbinned the PR approach and the fake grin. Despite the way his team performed, he spent the game looking like a man on the rack. This is believable, and realism is encouraging; you can relate to it, and you know what it’s thinking.

Secondly, England did something different yesterday. Did you spot it? They competed for possession when they lost it, instead of retreating. They chased and tackled. And they kept it up. This was one game where they didn’t end up overstretched, or pinned into their own area for the last fifteen minutes. This has been a matter of enormous personal frustration for this England-watcher, ever since the June ‘79 friendly draw with Sweden.

Then there is the team itself. I’m pleased to see little press influence in its make-up. Ramsey-style, injuries have imposed a line-up and a shape, and, all of a sudden, you can hear it click into place. Heskey’s not Rooney - he’s not even Crouch - but all he has to do is make it easy for Owen, and he did rather more than that. Welcome back, Emile; make yourself comfortable. Barry isn’t Scholes, Gerrard, or even Lampard; he’s not Barton thank heaven. But he looked right, a kind of midfield version of Roger Hunt.

The proper players are back, and it shows. Owen’s goal was his best for England (I’ve never rated the ‘98 one - I first saw it six months after the event and was hugely disappointed. Not so this time). SWP has his mojo back, and I wonder, looking at him, if he’ll ever lose it so badly again. David Bentley is finally in the squad, and should stay there. Micah Richards has proved himself beyond all doubt, now, and should really be first choice from here on.

Above all, it feels real. Not the greatest side in the world, or even a golden generation, but they play as a group and work hard.

Sol Campbell for John Terry, if Campbell is fit, and there’s the team to face Russia.

In case you missed it, here is the match on Youtube video. If you don’t want to know the score, look away now etc.:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

Part Ten

Part Eleven

I’d gone to Mabel’s Tavern near Kings Cross to chat with a potential co-author about a book on England managers. The 2006 World Cup was still some months away, neither Rooney nor Owen nor Neville nor.. were yet injured, the beer was well-kept and I was thinking James Callaghan=Ron Greenwood.

As things stand with English culture, there are two leaders: the Prime Minister and the England Football Manager. It’s interesting how often they are the same sort of men.

Greenwood and Callaghan - avuncular figures both, reassuringly ancient-looking to the gangling figure I was in 1979, are the obvious pairing. Ramsey and Wilson triumphed together, and were tied together in defeat and disaster. Revie is Wilson’s third term, distracted, confused and truncated. Major and Taylor, intelligent, down-to-earth men handed impossible situations and given no help from the press in making the best of them. Blair and Sven, or Blair and Hoddle, depending on your opinion of TB. I prefer Blair (as leader in waiting) and Venables, from that lovely, sunny optimistic bubble of a period 1994-6.

Of course none of those comparisons would make it past any degree of scrutiny. And is Walter Winterbottom Attlee, Churchill, Eden or Macmillan? None of the above: he’s more like Gaitskell. And there’s the trouble: periods can look temptingly straightforward and easily classifiable when you glance back at them. Thus the misleading, always misleading, phrase of the blowhard: “It was a simpler time.” No it wasn’t.

Teams of the decade, similarly. The seventies belong to Paisley’s Liverpool, of course, no question, and the Youtube videos will have Teenage Kicks as their backing track. Except that Paisley’s Liverpool spill untidily into the worst of Thatcher’s eighties, and taking the seventies as a whole, they belong to Leeds, or do they belong to Clough, and is that to do with glam rock, or Brotherhood of Man?

(And anyway, Ajax were the team of the Seventies, just as the ‘95 Ajax team were the best of their decade and then the most influential as its sensational Old Boy network monopolised the European game for years afterwards).

So it’s nonsense. It’s fun nonsense, though. Let’s walk it back.

We can agree, can’t we, that Newcastle United were the team 1900-1914 - Herbert Chapman said so, and he had the advantage of having been there.

Chapman is to blame for our next candidates, too: the Huddersfield Town side that won a hat trick of League titles and an FA Cup in the twenties. But only in the early twenties, mind: if you’re going to play that thing you have to wait until Dean’s Everton annus mirabilis of 1927, and the trouble with 1927 is that Cardiff City take the FA Cup out of England for the only time, and the trouble with that is that they beat Arsenal in the Final, and the trouble with that is that Arsenal are by then managed by Herbert Chapman. Let’s just give the man the trophy now and have done with it..

It almost gets dull in the ’30s: Chapman again, another FA Cup, another hat-trick of titles. He died relatively young, and that in 1934 with another 5 years of peace to play with, but not before being some kind of manager of England in one match. It’s safe to assume that had he lived, it would have meant more of the same. After he died, it was never the same: no Englishman has given our national game the same thought, nor brought to it the same energy and innovation.

The 1940s belong to Dynamo Kiev.

England’s greatest ever international team flick by unnoticed in the postwar period, and then we are into the 1950s, groping about for a team to sum the period up. The Busby Babes, sure: but they were so far ahead of their time (they were an influence on that Ajax side). Better perhaps to choose gallumphing Wolves, crashing and fluking their way past elegant, brilliant Honved. Honved.. and then Real Madrid: two marvellous teams in countries run by authoritarian dictatorships. To think that Puskas might have come to England.

The Sixties are football’s longest decade. Four England teams come and go: the shattered post-Munich side of Robson and Kevan; the Greaves/Charlton racehorses under Winterbottom; Ramsey’s Amber Glow chaps; and I count the 1970 side, who were so good against Brazil that I simply have to see it again:

It’s very, very hard to isolate a club side. Don’t forget the Spurs of Blanchflower and co., who won the first double of the century and brought us back the European Cup Winners Cup. After the Mark Robins moment of the ‘63 Cup Final (in which Leicester City were hot favourites), the United of Law, Charlton and Best. But Shankly’s Liverpool.. Revie’s Leeds.. late-decade flowering from both Everton and Manchester City as club football reached its all-time height amidst a storm of complaints from a purblind press.

Courtesy of Dominic Sandbrook, perhaps its time to admit that Leeds United were the team closest to the real heart of England in both the sixties and the seventies. Like the England of the time, paranoid, over-cautious, unselfconsciously corrupt, increasingly violent, but capable of lyricism when they allowed themselves off the leash.

That personality clash within the soul of the Leeds team; its very longevity; the drama of so many near misses; the way Revie has vanished from the popular mind more completely than Lucan. And the modern feel. No harking back to past glories, no Beatles associations - just a city ringed with motorways, a team with no history and no luck, a new badge, a new strip, and a moment in the sun on a big fat heavy staticked-up family television in a pale brick suburb in some town that doesn’t know yet just how hard the eighties were going to be to it.

And what about the eighties? In my head, I hear John Motson intoning “Rush.. Barnes… Beardsley.. McMahon now..” and I can still remember the heavy, lowering certainty that this was how it would be forever. Liverpool had all the money, bought up all the good players, left other sides in their wake. Which is why, perhaps, Big Ron’s Manchester United of Robson, Moses, Davenport and co. should be the eighties team. At Old Trafford, the eighties were the times when things were always about to come good. The old days were always nearly back again - held up by traffic on the city perimeter, sure, but on their way.

The Conservatives will never return to government until they revise the pollyanna-ish denialism of their happy-ending stories about the two huge recessions that took place under their watch. Manchester United had hoped to get back to winning league titles without admitting to all the rubbish in the garage, but resigned themselves to it in the end. It’s not just about buying one or two new players to complete the team: it’s an entire culture, and only Chelsea under Mourinho have changed their culture overnight.

I wish there was a decade to hand to Arsene Wenger’s beautiful Arsenal sides. There’s still time for it to be this one. It would be no bad fit: foreign wars aside, this has been a time of relative domestic peace and security in Britain. Picking Arsenal would deflect from the irresistable sense that the England team missed its moment in this generation, albeit largely through bad luck with injuries. That lovely polyglot, multi-ethnic, multi-nationality side stands for London, too, at at time when it has become World City again.

Looking back on that drink at Mabel’s, it feels as if no sooner had I plonked my empty glass down than the injuries came again, just like 2002 and 2004. Always Owen, always Beckham, now always Rooney: in 2002 it had been “always Gerrard.” Never the supporting cast. Always the stars. Always the Robin Cooks, the Donald Dewars, the Mo Mowlems..

Video

Newcastle United: see the last MTMG film for NUFC 1900-14 footage in glorious slow motion (the last 4 mins or so)

Cardiff v Arsenal 1927:

1930s Arsenal:

Wolves v Honved:

Leeds United:

Big Ron’s Manchester United Pub Side:

Wenger’s first Arsenal:

We came in with England. Two moments that encapsulate the last ten years between them: