Among football's great clichés is the one you hear each time a striker beats a
defender or two and, faced with only the goalkeeper and an achingly large
expanse of net, loses his balance, or his bottle, and misses. “Ooh,” the
commentator will say with a groan. “He did the hard part.”
The strange thing about this cliché is that it is a myth, not a universal
truth. Scoring the goal is the hard part, not the set-up. Getting through a
wall of defenders is tough, but the individual has no pressure beyond what
is familiar until the frozen moment when the chance presents itself and the
collective work of the entire group, plus the personal reputation of one
man, are on the line.
Luka Modric was pretty much played out of the game by Juliano Belletti when
Tottenham Hotspur played Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Sunday, yet he drew
largely favourable reviews for working hard, even though he failed to create
an opening of note. Yet if Darren Bent had missed the fortuitous scoring
opportunity he was given by Frank Lampard's misdirected mop-up job, all of
Tottenham's scheming and Bent's standing as a player who could be trusted to
win significant matches for them would have been lost. The value of a
goalscorer to his team cannot be overestimated, as Fabio Capello, the
England manager, may be about to find out.
Michael Owen is not his old self and has not resembled his old self in an
England shirt since it became clear under Sven-Göran Eriksson that the team
were designed to serve the needs of Wayne Rooney, Lampard and Steven Gerrard
ahead of his. The turning point was the European Championship finals in
2004, when Owen was detailed to stretch the play so that Rooney and
England's attacking midfield players would have space in which to operate.
Goalscorers are, by definition, selfish. Owen did not greatly appreciate being
part of an ensemble piece or the straight man in a double act and many
thought that his performances suffered, without appreciating that his role
had changed. In fact, he did his new job well, if joylessly, and Rooney ran
riot. Owen scored the first goal in the quarter-final against Portugal,
though, before Rooney was injured and England's best chance of winning a
tournament under Eriksson went west.
Owen was injured before the knockout stages of the 2006 World Cup finals and
was missing for most of the failed Euro 2008 qualifying campaign, although
in the five competitive matches he did play for Steve McClaren he scored
four goals, including two against Russia. Capello is not stupid. At any
other time in Owen's career he would have been selected for England, even if
the manager has reservations about his contribution to the team outside the
penalty area, and the interpretation that this is the end of Owen's
international career has been overplayed. Once he is fit he will surely be
included in the squad, even if he has to battle Jermain Defoe for a place in
the starting line-up.
Yet as much as one is initially drawn to Capello's reasoning that the England
squad is no place to be working on physical conditioning, the fact remains
that he is leaving behind the only player who has consistently done the hard
part for England - and in some hard places, too.
Peter Crouch's goal ratio for England is better than Owen's - one every 116
minutes as opposed to one every 155 - but statistics can be deceptive. David
Nugent's international record is one goal every 11 minutes, because in his
only appearance he came on after 79 minutes against Andorra and scored.
Equally, when inspected, the figures for Owen and Crouch do not compare.
Crouch's goal against Croatia in November was his first against what may be
termed frontline opposition. Goals against Trinidad & Tobago and Estonia
are important, too, but Crouch's roll call lacks Owen's gravitas. The
Newcastle United striker's scoring performances against, among many others,
Croatia, Germany, France, Romania, Portugal, Argentina and Brazil reveal a
player for the big occasion. Either way, Capello has rendered Crouch and
Owen's rivalry, or compatibility as a partnership, irrelevant, for neither
has been selected in his squad.
Maybe the hard part is not what is troubling Capello going into matches
against Andorra and Croatia. Perhaps he thinks that against one of the
weakest nations in Europe, goals will come as night follows day and a sharp
Defoe will be every bit as effective as Owen in partnership with Rooney.
This is pretty much what happened the previous time, after all, when England
did not play well but still beat Andorra 3-0, with even Nugent on the
scoresheet.
Perhaps goals are not Capello's priority in Zagreb, either, and his ambition
is to shut out the opposition. Croatia are yet to lose a competitive match
at home and in the circumstances a goalless draw would be seen as a triumph.
Yet it is also a difficult result to achieve, with no margin for error.
McClaren's 5-3-2 game plan in Zagreb in 2006 was designed with the same
limited aim and, even by the admission of Slaven Bilic, the Croatia coach,
was working well until Paul Robinson strayed off his line and was beaten by
a soft header from Eduardo Da Silva after 61 minutes. At which point, with a
team set up not to lose, England had to try to win the last half-hour to
salvage a point and never came close.
It is possible to imagine Capello deploying a conservative five-man midfield
of David Beckham, Gareth Barry, Lampard, Jermaine Jenas and Rooney in
Zagreb, with Defoe up front, but if Croatia score, who will do the hard
part? Defoe looked in excellent form for Portsmouth against Everton on
Saturday, scoring twice, but was less impressive given more stringent tests
by Chelsea and Manchester United in the preceding weeks, to the extent that
Harry Redknapp, his club manager, is considering switching to 4-5-1 in
matches against the elite four Barclays Premier League clubs, with Crouch on
his own and Defoe on the bench.
For England, questions remain. Since scoring on an impressive starting debut
against Poland in September 2004, Defoe has hit the net in only two other
matches, at home against Andorra and in a friendly away to Trinidad &
Tobago that was taken so seriously by Capello that he ignored Fifa's
restrictions on the use of substitutes and nearly got it declared void.
Defoe is only now getting a run in the team, but he has still made nine
international starts and 15 substitute appearances since the match against
Poland, enough to have more to show for his efforts.
The same is true of Rooney, who is yet to score for Capello in a barren run
stretching back to October 17, 2007, in Moscow. Frustratingly, his
international career is full of similar episodes. No goals in a year from
November 12, 2005, to November 15, 2006; one goal in 11 matches starting
from June 21, 2004. He can be brilliant, but he is not prolific; he has
scored twice in competitive matches in more than four years. Beyond that,
nothing.
Emile Heskey's most recent goal for England was more than five years ago, in a
friendly against South Africa. He has not scored in a competitive match
since the World Cup finals in 2002. Theo Walcott is yet to feature outside
of friendly games and even then only as a substitute. He has never done the
hard part for England, although no one blames him for that.
Should Capello have called Owen into this squad, even if he had no plan to
start him against Andorra on Saturday? Taking every aspect into
consideration, yes. Even if he lacks sharpness, the match against Croatia is
a week away. If Capello was prepared to select Owen Hargreaves after one
appearance for Manchester United this season, then surely it would have been
worth having Owen in the camp, even if it was to keep him within a fitness
regime that is said to be substantially more exacting than is experienced at
many clubs.
Many of the Newcastle squad will be on international duty now anyway; clubs
tend to wind down during this period. If Capello is genuinely interested in
having Owen around against Kazakhstan and Belarus in October - and his camp
insists that he is - then working with England might have brought his
recovery on, or at least put him more in tune with Capello's thinking.
The unexpected bonus could have been that, if Owen had looked sharper in
training than he showed against Arsenal on Saturday, he may have come into
contention for a run-out against Andorra in Barcelona or, more
significantly, in Zagreb, where a goalscorer capable of defining the match
may be needed. Even now, Owen looks no less physically capable than Beckham,
who has performed in recent matches like a bloke who has just got off a
12-hour flight from Los Angeles.
Short of full fitness, Owen has scored two goals in three games for Newcastle,
which is one more than Heskey or Walcott and two more than Rooney, and while
Owen's second was against Coventry City in the Carling Cup, it still
represented the hard part because at that moment Newcastle were on the
knife-edge of extra time in their opening round of one of only two
competitions they have a hope of winning.
Capello is a modern football man and modern football has conflicting attitudes
to goalscorers. The most fashionable formations and tactical innovations
involve placing the match-winners in midfield and using the striker as a
target man, a maypole around which the revellers run. Yet the reason
strikers command the biggest transfer fees and the biggest salaries is
because scoring regularly remains the most difficult trick of all and those
who master it are rejected at the manager's peril.
How to rationalise the fact that a manager with a reputation for applying
belt-and-braces solutions to his problems should risk being caught with his
trousers down if England require an equaliser or a breakthrough in the two
games that will shape his future as a national manager? Why is Capello
seemingly looking for trouble? Understanding that is the hard part, too.
