England going out of Euro 2012 at the quarter-final stage, after a penalty shoot-out -- who'd have expected that? The optimists, that's who -- pessimistic (or even just realistic) fans never expected them to get beyond the group stage. Last night's game was so lopsided that it's actually a relief to have the team on its way home -- fluking their way into a one-sided semi-final thrashing by Germany would have been downright embarrassing.
The tournament did allow us to dispel a few myths, however. For example:
Myth #1: that England lose because their rope-a-dope tactic, waiting for the opposition to come onto them and then hitting them on the break, causes them to tire out. How many times have you heard commentators say that "it's far more tiring chasing the ball than passing it around"? Well, at the end of the group stage, the OPTA statistics showed, as anyone who watched the games would realise, that England had enjoyed far less than 50% possession of the ball in all of their games -- yet the total distance covered by England players was actually the lowest of any of the sixteen teams that started the tournament. Seems England players don't rush around like madmen trying to harry their more skilled opponents into making mistakes; they mainly just stand around waiting for the ball to hit them.
Myth #2: that Wayne Rooney is a world-class player. Wazza hasn't scored a goal in the final stages of a major tournament since 2004, but his apologists have always been able to cite injuries in mitigation. This time he missed the first two games as a result of a suspension, but was confidently expected to turn up for the final group game "loaded for bear", and to carry the team forward from there. In the event he was heavy-legged and clumsy. Sure, he scored in the Ukraine game, but as the columnist Giles Smith put it, it was a goal Pele could be proud of -- the current 71-year old Pele, that is, not the Pele of old. After this tournament, anyone who calls Rooney a world-class player deserves to be bitch-slapped by any and all of Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Andrea Pirlo and Bastian Schweinsteiger, to name but a few.
Myth #3: that Roy Hodgson is a good manager. Sure, he didn't have much time to work with the players, and there were a lot of injuries, but really! He selected Stewart Downing for the squad, a man who recorded neither a goal nor an assist in league football last season. Predictably, Downing didn't get on the field. And what of those who did get on the field? Well, we've already looked at Rooney, but what about Ashley Young? At the end of the knockout stage, the OPTA stats rated him as the least effective player in the England's group -- the whole group, mark you, not just the England squad. Yet Hodgson allowed him to start the quarter final, where he turned in another startlingly disengaged performance, and then became the first England player to fail to score in the penalty shoot-out.
Myth #4: despite this latest setback, the future still looks bright. On what possible basis?? England's best players over the past two weeks were Steven Gerrard, John Terry, Ashley Cole and Joleon Lescott. The first three of that quartet will be getting quite long in the tooth by the time of the World Cup in Brazil, in 2014. The various up-and-comers in the squad either got only limited playing time (Oxlade-Chamberlain) or no playing time at all (Phil Jones, among others). Unless you really think travel broadens the mind, it's hard to see how the experience of flying around Eastern Europe, only to watch games from the sidelines, can have done anything for these players' future development.
I've mentioned the OPTA statistics a couple of times here, and this post gives me the opportunity to cite my favourite OPTA number of all time. A few years ago the Swedish striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic was substituted after about 60 minutes of a Champions League Game. At that time, he had only run 500 metres further than his own goalkeeper! Yet Ibrahimovic would walk into the current England team. Quite literally, perhaps.
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