Emotions Are Out of Control
In another episode of watching athletes’ planes on TV news, Wednesday we watched a private jet descend, descend, descend, land safely and decelerate to a stop.
Looked like fine piloting.
Then, after the star athlete apparently disembarked, we had an aerial view above his sprawling house near Liverpool as a vehicle pulled up. Michael Owen emerged and ambled on crutches into the house.
Gripping.
England, the birthplace of soccer, the home of probably the foremost league on Earth, has another wrinkle in its growing striker crisis.
Brief timeline:
* May 8: National Coach Sven-Goran Eriksson selects four strikers for the World Cup team, a number apparently insufficient. Two (Owen, Wayne Rooney) occupy various stages of broken-foot recovery. One (Theo Walcott) has no idea he’s selected, because he’s taking a driving test at the time, because he’s only 17, has never played in a Premier League match and has never played in any match witnessed by Eriksson. But he has promise. Nation has conniption.
* June 10-19: World Cup starts. Nation obsesses. Offense lacks. Rooney misses first game, substitutes in second. Eriksson doesn’t use Walcott, possibly suggesting distrust. Walcott walks Baden Baden streets with girlfriend. They look adorable. Offense lacks. Fourth striker, Peter Crouch, scores only by scaling Trinidad and Tobago defender by pulling his dreadlocks. Offense lacks. Nation awaits goal-mad Rooney-Owen combination for third game.
* June 20: Rooney-Owen combination lasts 53 seconds before Owen crumples with horrid knee injury. England has only three strikers, and one is 17. England wins Group B, but only after frightful second half with Sweden. Eriksson reiterates that midfielder Steven Gerrard can play striker. But something in Eriksson’s naturally dreary voice doesn’t convince, and the way England plays second halves, it’s as if he spends halftime telling them bleak stories about childhood winters in Sweden when the temperature wouldn’t go up and the sun wouldn’t stay out.
* June 21: Three strikers, one 17. Shouldn’t Sven have chosen the very capable Jermain Defoe way back on May 8? Yes. There’s Owen, flying home. And what formation do we use? Here’s our presumed greatest soccer generation since 1966, Sven with 5 1/2 years on the job, and we’re still not sure about formation. Everybody has a theory on formation.
But look at the draw. Ecuador in the round of 16 when it could’ve been Germany, and no Argentina until the final at the earliest. Can you imagine if we had to play Germany like this? There’s enough stress playing Germany as it is.
But, we don’t. And we still have a raft of world-class players, even if not many are strikers. And there’s no way we lose to Ecuador.
Despair, expectation, expectation, despair. Hard for an American meddler to keep up.
