Post by Scott on Jul 11, 2006 2:29:23 GMT
From 365:
For a group of people who are hardly famed for their passion for literature, many of England's footballers are apparently about to bring books out about their World Cup experiences, amongst other things, and rumours have it that some of them are going to be very critical of Sven and blame him for their poor performance.
There are few worse sights than a footballer trying to excuse his terrible form as somehow not being his own fault.
So far scheduled for a book in the near future are volume one of the Rooney five-part existential deconstruction of the ego; Lampard's 'Shooting for Deflections' and 'A Guide to Witty After-Dinner Speaking' by Steven Gerrard. Then there's Ashley Cole's text book; 'Interpersonal Dynamics and their place of the Market Economy' and Rio's coffee table book 'Dead Good Haircuts for Gangstas'. What next? A beginner's guide on how to use large amounts of money to buy the intimacy of fake blonde ladies?
This is a septuplet of literary giants I'm sure you will agree. Alright, not one of them will write a single word and someone such as Shaun Custis will be ghost writing it for them but it will have them on the cover. That's the main thing.
Frank Lampard's effort, 'Totally W*nk' - ah sorry, make that 'Totally Frank', is reported in The Observer as being especially critical for Sven never making any attempt to sort out his and Gerrard's midfield problems and, so the paper says, complains they were simply left to get on with the job.
Having to work something out for yourself is naturally an insult to a footballer. You can't expect them to do that, not even if they were privately educated. And anyway, the real solution to them not being able to play together was either to drop him or play them in a five-man midfield, which is what happened. If it says in his book he should have been dropped then fair enough. I bet it doesn't.
He's also said to be critical of training sessions in Germany after the draw with Sweden which were spent on organising the defence for set-pieces rather than, as Frankie thought, on ball skills and tactics. Didn't he see our defence in that game? And just how many ball skills can you learn in a couple of days that you don't already know?
As we all know, Lampard managed to get into goalscoring positions on so many occasions and just couldn't score. Since he got into those excellent positions does he want us to believe that he was responsible for getting in the position but not for the terrible shot? That it was Sven who made him miss even though Sven's tactics worked well enough for him to get into a goalscoring position? It makes no sense.
We had Michael Owen's interview at the weekend in which he blamed the tactics Sven deployed after his leg burst for Rooney getting sent off. This is all so lame. Far more responsible for Rooney getting sent off were Rooney himself, the referee, the referee's instructions from FIFA, the Portuguese in general and Ronaldo specifically.
And Owen has got some nerve. Here is a man who has been a part-time footballer for two years and is due to have a year off on full wages of £115,000 a week who was a passenger in the games he played. What he should be doing is criticising Sven for picking him in the first place.
It all smacks of scapegoating. They are really trying to say, 'It wasn't my fault that we were crap, it was the manager who made me and my mates so rotten. I'm not as rubbish as I looked honest. I'm not just over-rated because I play against weak opposition a lot in the league and alongside better players. Honest. Now pay me more money.'
I'm not buying this spin. No one should.
And even if, as I think we must, give Sven a bit of a spanking for some rubbish selection and tactical decisions and for being far too conservative generally, why did Lampard and the rest of his critics consistently pop up on the TV and the papers saying how he and Gerrard could play together and everything was fine? If it was so wrong for so long and he had such doubts why didn't they do something about it? There was plenty of time to do so. It's no bloody good moaning about it after it's all gone t****** up is it? If you knew how to fix it, why didn't you do so? I'm sure Sven would have been happy to let you.
I hope fans won't go along with their accounts in their books just in order to avoid criticising their favourite players because this is certainly the ploy of some of the journalists ghost-writing them. If they can successfully lay all the blame on Sven, it leaves them free to brown-nose players and continue to get exclusives. It's so handy to be able to blame it all on the manager who is no longer around.
Except of course he is around. Steve McClaren most certainly is. Sven is criticised for his hands-off style and allowing others to do all the coaching, so it's really McClaren who these players are in large part criticising.
Part of the problem that bumbling Barwick - wearer of the worst, creepy moustache in public life since Peter Mandelson's weasily top-lip growth - created by hiring McClaren when he did, was that McClaren inherits all this baggage form the start. It's not credible to say you just went along with a whole system, a choice of squad and regime of tactics even though you knew it wouldn't work. That makes you look worse than just admitting it all went wrong. McClaren can't get out of his responsibilities any more than the players.
As much as he might want to he can't separate himself very much from the Sven regime because to do so suggests he was either superfluous to events or that he couldn't stand up to Sven who, let's face it, is hardly a scary ogre.
It's not hard to see all these forthcoming literary excursions as souring relations for all of them with McClaren from the start. There's just five weeks until the next England game. If he's going to be successful he has to admit the errors made were at least partly down to him. He's got to show he's learned from it and he has to root out players who might want to undermine him from the start. If he doesn't he won't last a year. He has to get the players to take responsibility for their own actions and not to let this culture of laying off blame blossom. The players will not learn from their failure and will continue to delude themselves about their own inadequacies otherwise.
The bottom line with these critical players is either they were silent and thereby complicit in the mistakes or they're just covering their arses after they failed to do the business on the pitch. Meekly accepting tactics and organisation they knew to be flawed is worse than just playing badly.
Except of course they didn't really know it was wrong until it was proved to be so. This is surely all hindsight and it's all designed to stop a bunch of over-rated, over-paid and under-performing players from taking responsibility for their own actions and being seen for what they really are; good but not great players , managed by a good but not great manager.
For a group of people who are hardly famed for their passion for literature, many of England's footballers are apparently about to bring books out about their World Cup experiences, amongst other things, and rumours have it that some of them are going to be very critical of Sven and blame him for their poor performance.
There are few worse sights than a footballer trying to excuse his terrible form as somehow not being his own fault.
So far scheduled for a book in the near future are volume one of the Rooney five-part existential deconstruction of the ego; Lampard's 'Shooting for Deflections' and 'A Guide to Witty After-Dinner Speaking' by Steven Gerrard. Then there's Ashley Cole's text book; 'Interpersonal Dynamics and their place of the Market Economy' and Rio's coffee table book 'Dead Good Haircuts for Gangstas'. What next? A beginner's guide on how to use large amounts of money to buy the intimacy of fake blonde ladies?
This is a septuplet of literary giants I'm sure you will agree. Alright, not one of them will write a single word and someone such as Shaun Custis will be ghost writing it for them but it will have them on the cover. That's the main thing.
Frank Lampard's effort, 'Totally W*nk' - ah sorry, make that 'Totally Frank', is reported in The Observer as being especially critical for Sven never making any attempt to sort out his and Gerrard's midfield problems and, so the paper says, complains they were simply left to get on with the job.
Having to work something out for yourself is naturally an insult to a footballer. You can't expect them to do that, not even if they were privately educated. And anyway, the real solution to them not being able to play together was either to drop him or play them in a five-man midfield, which is what happened. If it says in his book he should have been dropped then fair enough. I bet it doesn't.
He's also said to be critical of training sessions in Germany after the draw with Sweden which were spent on organising the defence for set-pieces rather than, as Frankie thought, on ball skills and tactics. Didn't he see our defence in that game? And just how many ball skills can you learn in a couple of days that you don't already know?
As we all know, Lampard managed to get into goalscoring positions on so many occasions and just couldn't score. Since he got into those excellent positions does he want us to believe that he was responsible for getting in the position but not for the terrible shot? That it was Sven who made him miss even though Sven's tactics worked well enough for him to get into a goalscoring position? It makes no sense.
We had Michael Owen's interview at the weekend in which he blamed the tactics Sven deployed after his leg burst for Rooney getting sent off. This is all so lame. Far more responsible for Rooney getting sent off were Rooney himself, the referee, the referee's instructions from FIFA, the Portuguese in general and Ronaldo specifically.
And Owen has got some nerve. Here is a man who has been a part-time footballer for two years and is due to have a year off on full wages of £115,000 a week who was a passenger in the games he played. What he should be doing is criticising Sven for picking him in the first place.
It all smacks of scapegoating. They are really trying to say, 'It wasn't my fault that we were crap, it was the manager who made me and my mates so rotten. I'm not as rubbish as I looked honest. I'm not just over-rated because I play against weak opposition a lot in the league and alongside better players. Honest. Now pay me more money.'
I'm not buying this spin. No one should.
And even if, as I think we must, give Sven a bit of a spanking for some rubbish selection and tactical decisions and for being far too conservative generally, why did Lampard and the rest of his critics consistently pop up on the TV and the papers saying how he and Gerrard could play together and everything was fine? If it was so wrong for so long and he had such doubts why didn't they do something about it? There was plenty of time to do so. It's no bloody good moaning about it after it's all gone t****** up is it? If you knew how to fix it, why didn't you do so? I'm sure Sven would have been happy to let you.
I hope fans won't go along with their accounts in their books just in order to avoid criticising their favourite players because this is certainly the ploy of some of the journalists ghost-writing them. If they can successfully lay all the blame on Sven, it leaves them free to brown-nose players and continue to get exclusives. It's so handy to be able to blame it all on the manager who is no longer around.
Except of course he is around. Steve McClaren most certainly is. Sven is criticised for his hands-off style and allowing others to do all the coaching, so it's really McClaren who these players are in large part criticising.
Part of the problem that bumbling Barwick - wearer of the worst, creepy moustache in public life since Peter Mandelson's weasily top-lip growth - created by hiring McClaren when he did, was that McClaren inherits all this baggage form the start. It's not credible to say you just went along with a whole system, a choice of squad and regime of tactics even though you knew it wouldn't work. That makes you look worse than just admitting it all went wrong. McClaren can't get out of his responsibilities any more than the players.
As much as he might want to he can't separate himself very much from the Sven regime because to do so suggests he was either superfluous to events or that he couldn't stand up to Sven who, let's face it, is hardly a scary ogre.
It's not hard to see all these forthcoming literary excursions as souring relations for all of them with McClaren from the start. There's just five weeks until the next England game. If he's going to be successful he has to admit the errors made were at least partly down to him. He's got to show he's learned from it and he has to root out players who might want to undermine him from the start. If he doesn't he won't last a year. He has to get the players to take responsibility for their own actions and not to let this culture of laying off blame blossom. The players will not learn from their failure and will continue to delude themselves about their own inadequacies otherwise.
The bottom line with these critical players is either they were silent and thereby complicit in the mistakes or they're just covering their arses after they failed to do the business on the pitch. Meekly accepting tactics and organisation they knew to be flawed is worse than just playing badly.
Except of course they didn't really know it was wrong until it was proved to be so. This is surely all hindsight and it's all designed to stop a bunch of over-rated, over-paid and under-performing players from taking responsibility for their own actions and being seen for what they really are; good but not great players , managed by a good but not great manager.
