They got what they deserved

Complacent to the last, Eriksson and his spoilt players got what they deserved - absolutely nichts Richard Williams in Baden-BadenMonday July 3, 2006The Guardian
In the aftermath of a punishing defeat, no man should be called to account for his impromptu remarks. But when Frank Lampard said on Saturday night that England had "deserved" to win the match in which defeat had just eliminated them from the World Cup, he was inadvertently exposing the problem at the heart of the team's consistent inability to scale the highest peaks.
David Beckham had used the same word earlier in the campaign. England would get to the World Cup final, the captain said, because they "deserved" to be there. Since no deeper analysis was forthcoming, his listeners were left to infer that the evidence in support of his contention might have included any or all of the following: England's historic role as the game's mother country; the vast popularity of the Premiership at home and abroad; the inflated pay and celebrity status of its players; and the attention lavished on the public appearances of their wives and girlfriends.
When Sven-Goran Eriksson also spoke about the team "deserving" to reach the final, he tried to suggest that it was because of the quality of their football. Strictly on the basis of their successive performances against Hungary, Jamaica, Paraguay, Trinidad & Tobago, Sweden and Ecuador, however, it would have taken a battalion of the world's finest legal advocates to make a case for the justice of their arrival in the final rounds of the biggest international football tournament of all.
The attitude represented by the words of Lampard and Beckham represents a culture of complacency at work, and it could be seen in the climactic shoot-out against Portugal, when three of England's penalty takers failed with attempts in which the slackness of their body language and their shooting spoke of men who were ready to put their trust in the belief, as England players have believed for several generations, that their reputations alone would be enough to ensure their success.
A successful apprenticeship in the upper reaches of English football wraps such an effective comfort blanket around a young player that he is seldom exposed to the harsh realities of the outside world, and never confronts those moments in which failure really does mean disaster. When they are called to summon reserves of resilience at moments of extreme pressure, they discover those reserves either do not exist or have been depleted by the demands of domestic football.
Where, on Saturday, was the Englishman prepared to take control of the game as Zinédine Zidane would do in France's defeat of Brazil later that night? The only candidate was Owen Hargreaves, who both converted his penalty - the one Englishman to do so - and secured the man- of-the-match award with 120 minutes of non-stop tackling, intercepting, running and passing. Alone among his colleagues, he displayed a dynamism that seemed to come from within. What also makes him unique among the squad, of course, is that he has never lived in England. The two things may not be unconnected.
Before Hargreaves was born, his parents left Britain to make a new life for their family in Canada. They succeeded, and in so doing may have laid the mental foundation for his son's career. Owen Hargreaves arrived in Munich as a 16-year-old and began a long struggle to establish himself among the superstars in the first team at Bayern, in a country where he knew no one and had to learn the language from scratch. When times were difficult, when he was dropped or suffered injuries, his parents' example of ambition and self-sufficiency can have done him no harm.
Hargreaves may also have benefited from the Bundesliga's 34-match season and its mid-winter break. Whereas he faced up to Portugal's challenge with what the English like to see as their characteristic qualities of energy and doggedness, his native-born team-mates struggled to turn their talent and desire for success into the currency of coherent football.
Individually, there was much to admire in their display - in Ashley Cole's gradual return to form, in John Terry's obduracy, in Aaron Lennon's zigzag runs and in Peter Crouch's sheer willingness - but collectively they could only demonstrate the difficulty they experience in achieving, even sporadically, the kind of momentum that the better sides in this tournament have maintained virtually from first whistle to last.
Permutating his resources for the fifth time in five matches as he responded to the opposition's strengths and his own squad's injuries, Eriksson asked Hargreaves to provide a screen for the defence while a midfield quartet attempted to support Wayne Rooney, the lone front runner. That it took the coach so long to reach this conclusion, after having Hargreaves in his squad for almost five years, is among the most serious indictments of his regime.
The fatal flaw in the way the formation was applied was the use of Rio Ferdinand as the launchpad for attacks. On countless occasions the ball was given to the centre-back in the expectation that he would make the first significant pass. He would take a touch to control the ball, look up, take another touch, look up again, have another think and then, after a delay often of six or seven seconds, play it - not always accurately - to a team-mate.
By the time he was ready to part with the ball, two things would have happened: first, his team-mates had effectively come to a standstill; second, the Portuguese defenders had been given the time to move in to cover them. So almost every England move would start from a static position, with the opposition well prepared for counter-measures.
Although Ferdinand is a decent passer of the ball, he is not Andrea Pirlo. Neither is Hargreaves, but he should have been encouraged to become the kind of pivot that Claude Makelele represents for Chelsea and France, taking the ball from the defence and recycling it to the midfield with the minimum of fuss or wasted time, acting as the team's metronome. Then England might have had a chance to develop the kind of rhythm and movement that we sometimes see from Arsenal, Chelsea and, less frequently nowadays, Manchester United, but at which English-born players in general have never been adept.
When the Football Association hired Eriksson as England's first foreign coach, it was reasonable to expect that an improvement in fluidity was among the benefits the players could expect from his long experience in Italy and Portugal. All they got, really, was a swift application of common sense to a formerly chaotic selection policy and a discovery that Eriksson's notion of an acceptable standard of living matched their own five-star expectations.
His inability to get Englishmen to play football together with a combination of spontaneity and consistency means that, after its promising start, the Eriksson era must on balance be accounted a failure. Sadly, given the unfailing courtesy with which he confronted an often hostile environment, he was not the man to dismantle the mental barrier that prevented his players from turning their talents into real achievement at international level. In the end they, and he, deserved no more than they got.