They’ve Already Written England Off
The England-versus-Portugal melodrama still sits one day off, yet already we have a winner.
Rampaging and cunning, dreaded and loathed, able to puncture a defense like no force left in the World Cup, this winner is the astonishing British press, unbeaten for eons save for a tabloid lawsuit settlement here and there.
Even Deco, the Portugese midfielder, noted the dynasty’s ferocity.
It not only has fed a strangely temperate national shrug about England’s chances from here, it has burrowed into enough high-salaried skin to merit comprehensive victory.
Invading the skin of imperious Portugal Coach Luiz Felipe Scolari might seem undemanding -- he once hit a journalist -- but England Coach Sven-Goran Eriksson long seemed to have thick epidermis, perhaps hardened by Swedish winters of childhood.
The perennial winner has ruffled both camps.
From Eriksson, it wrung a comment startling at this stage, “Of course there’s a plan,” which did come as news to many.
One win from a semifinal that England has graced only once since the sacred Cup-winning year of 1966, Eriksson had to plead, “Don’t tell me that I don’t know what to do -- I know it exactly.” And: “What do you think we do with the players? Just say, ‘Good luck and do what you want to do?’ ”
Well, yeah, many might’ve replied, including the Times of London’s Hugh McIlvenny, who early on typed, gloriously, “If there is a patron saint of bunglers, his halo must be sweat-stained after the heavy shift of intercessionary activity needed to leave Sven-Goran Eriksson, and the England players he purports to lead, so agreeably positioned.”
It took less to rattle Scolari, who even in absentia left an edict for the British press: three questions only.
Apparently he’d chafed because a tabloid quoted a Portuguese player knocking England’s goalkeeper, an interview the newspaper said it got from a London translation service but the Portuguese team’s media man deemed a fake. Even Deco said England’s press “expects too much.”
But given that the deliciously eloquent James Lawton wrote in the Independent, “Their squad selection is increasingly a bad joke,” and, “Their tactical pattern is unfathomable,” and England is “a team that sometimes suggests they have been told to go out and play a version of blind-man’s bluff,” it seems England’s press might expect only world-class competence.
Hope has materialized, however, in a mini-fashion stoked by an articulate few: At least a loss to Portugal would keep the world from seeing us against Brazil.
Brian Reade of the Daily Mirror summarized how it feels to be in England during the 2006 World Cup: “England have arrived at the climax of a party the nation has been anticipating for years only to mope in the kitchen clutching a half-empty glass of warm lager, while those foreign fancy dans are up on the dance floor doing the fandango.”
He envisioned Saturday as “two hours of turgid ineptitude by our overhyped Golden Generation, followed with death by penalty.”
But he brightened as he noted both winning and losing have appeal: “Lose, and not only will we be spared an even-worse humiliation against Brazil, we’ll have a genuine reason to party like it’s 1966. That clueless, snoozing, cash-cow Sven-Goran Eriksson will be history.”
It’s hard to beat that.
