Head coach found wanting with his accent on untried
Published Tuesday, May 30, 2006 by Ceser | E-mail this post
IN THE end, despite everything we were promised, Sven-Göran Eriksson did not, after all, name the provisional England World Cup squad yesterday. John Motson did, in an exclusively recorded video announcement at the Café Royal in London, accompanied by a congregation of schoolchildren in commemorative shirts. One appreciates the desire to dress up these key moments in the life of the national game, but would it have hurt just to pin up a sheet of paper on a noticeboard?
Anyway, it came to pass that the disembodied voice of Motson decreed the squad of 23, and then the schoolchildren did their bit. They were there to symbolise hope, presumably, and to absorb the day’s lessons — namely, the lesson that if you strive for excellence, you will be rewarded. And also the lesson that you can strive as hard as you like, but if you are Darren Bent, you will get nothing but the summer off.
And then, finally, the England head coach trouped on to answer for himself. Sven wears on these public occasions the queasy expression of someone who has just had some of Spurs’ lasagna. He musters a smile, but you can tell he would rather be at home slamming his bare fingers in a filing cabinet for all the pleasure that a blind date with the press brings him.
Yesterday, antagonism came from the unlikely direction of the BBC’s Garth Crooks, whose normal mode of interrogation is a long-winded statement of the obvious, followed by a question mark. Not this time. Whether it was his decision to omit Jermain Defoe or the one to include Theo Walcott, we shall never know, but something made Crooks decide to get snappy and spend the better part of the televised press conference chewing Eriksson’s leg off.
What was he thinking of? Why Walcott? Why not Bent? Did he really think he had enough cover up front? What earthly chance would this squad stand against Brazil in a semi-final? Thus did the questions from Crooks pepper Sven, who appeared to grow visibly smaller under the assault, his responses ranging from the grammatically obscure (“It is always very sad to not picking people”), to the philosophically gnomic (“Sometimes things works out very well without being logic”) via the profoundly mournful (“Whatever I do, I will always have disappointed players”).
Anyway, it came to pass that the disembodied voice of Motson decreed the squad of 23, and then the schoolchildren did their bit. They were there to symbolise hope, presumably, and to absorb the day’s lessons — namely, the lesson that if you strive for excellence, you will be rewarded. And also the lesson that you can strive as hard as you like, but if you are Darren Bent, you will get nothing but the summer off.
And then, finally, the England head coach trouped on to answer for himself. Sven wears on these public occasions the queasy expression of someone who has just had some of Spurs’ lasagna. He musters a smile, but you can tell he would rather be at home slamming his bare fingers in a filing cabinet for all the pleasure that a blind date with the press brings him.
Yesterday, antagonism came from the unlikely direction of the BBC’s Garth Crooks, whose normal mode of interrogation is a long-winded statement of the obvious, followed by a question mark. Not this time. Whether it was his decision to omit Jermain Defoe or the one to include Theo Walcott, we shall never know, but something made Crooks decide to get snappy and spend the better part of the televised press conference chewing Eriksson’s leg off.
What was he thinking of? Why Walcott? Why not Bent? Did he really think he had enough cover up front? What earthly chance would this squad stand against Brazil in a semi-final? Thus did the questions from Crooks pepper Sven, who appeared to grow visibly smaller under the assault, his responses ranging from the grammatically obscure (“It is always very sad to not picking people”), to the philosophically gnomic (“Sometimes things works out very well without being logic”) via the profoundly mournful (“Whatever I do, I will always have disappointed players”).
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