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Journalism of Courage
Wide boys may have overrun the football industry but they have yet to force their way into this England team. In a minor golden age for wingers, Sven-Goran Eriksson continues to resist the temptation to launch Shaun Wright-Phillips and Stewart Downing along the flanks. The lethal pincer of pace and dribbling is not one the coach seems to want in his armoury.
Almost the best reason to tune into Premiership football these days is the harvest of outside lefts and rights who can attack with lacerating speed. And one of England’s most obvious deficiencies at Euro 2004 was a shortage of players who could fizz past opponents one-on-one. At home, this season, garlands have been tossed to Arjen Robben and Damien Duff at Chelsea, as well as Jose Antonio Reyes (Arsenal), Downing (Middlesbrough) and Willo Flood and Wright-Phillips at Manchester City.
These adventurers light flares in the imagination, and point us back to the days when football was about more than rigid organisation, when players were encouraged to dribble and feint and cut inside.
It is a truism of football down the ages that nothing thrills quite like a winger going past his man. With Robben and Duff, Chelsea have discovered a joie de vivre that was absent when Jose Mourinho first took over. Robben, especially, is destroying Premiership teams with his slash and burn capacities. Against West Bromwich Albion on Sunday, Downing, 20, combined the two essential attributes of a good outside left: pace, and precision to go with the cross.
Some wingers hit and hope. They are sprinters who forget to lift their heads. They have no ‘‘end product’’, as modern coaches like to say. Downing, however, curls and clips his crosses into the most productive areas. His eyes and brain work in harmony. For that reason it was dispiriting to see him confined to the England Under-21s for this week’s trip to Spain. His omission suggests that Eriksson is no longer experimenting with the team’s style of play.
(The Daily Telegraph)
