2006-05-30T04:40:00.000-07:00

Walcott, Sven agreed, was a gamble. “But, among 23 players, why not take one gambling?” True, although it is unlikely that the gambling will be restricted to just one of them, by all accounts.

It was probably a relief for Sven, all in all, when the FA lackey at his side threw the floor open to the schoolchildren. They wanted to know who was going to be the toughest opponent in England’s group (Sweden, Sven reckoned) and who would be the stars of the tournament (Sven had a hunch about Ronaldinho). But after two questions, that was it. If I had been their teacher, I’d have had a quiet word with Crooks in the corridor about hogging the available time.

On Sky Sports News, the pasting of Sven for his selections had been going on for a while before he did any selecting. News that he was likely to “go the Walcott route” had reached the channel ahead of Motson’s official presentation, meaning that Alan Mullery, a guest in the studio, had slagged off Eriksson for picking an untried striker 20 minutes before the Swede picked one — a record for impatience at international level.

Afterwards, Sven told Nick Collins, of Sky: “Of course you take a chance when you pick a seven-year-old boy.” You can say that again.

I bet they will be having fun with Sven’s accent in the England dressing-room in Germany. Doubtless someone in the squad will get him off pat. Not Walcott, but one of the more experienced players — one of the ones with, say, a couple of Premier League appearances under his belt.

In the victorious 1966 squad, the all-important job of impersonating the manager appears to have gone to Jack Charlton. At any rate, Charlton spent a lot of World Cup Stories, the first in a series of BBC documentaries, giving us the benefit of his Sir Alf Ramsey impression. It wasn’t great, not when you consider that Charlton has had 40 years in which to refine it.

But he’s not that easy, Sir Alf. There were the posh consonants, but also the traces of Jools Holland — the slight twang that revealed Sir Alf wasn’t posh really. For the squad announced yesterday, Sven is altogether more manageable — flatter, more one-dimensional, without meaning anything else by it. Typical. Today’s players have it so easy. The ones who are picked, anyway.

Head coach found wanting with his accent on untried

2006-05-30T04:39:00.000-07:00

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”).