England Shame

Winston Churchill described the fall of Singapore as "the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history" with his usual flair for exaggeration, but surely England's 1-0 defeat to Northern Ireland must come pretty close. To say that the defeat was an embarassment is to severely understate things, that it is a disaster is utterly and totally beyond doubt. It leaves England in a precarious position in terms of direct qualification for the World Cup next year in what must considered one of the softest and easiest of the qualifying groups.

To put things in perspective: the combined cost of the Northern Ireland team is less than a single one of England's vaunted stars, be it the 27m pound Wayne Rooney, the 30m pound Rio Ferdinand or the new 18m pound Michael Owen. While Manchester Utd's Rooney managed to get himself yellow carded and suspended for the next match, former Man Utd youth programme trainee David Healy, who never managed to break through the club ranks and was later sold for 1m pounds, scored the winner with a wonderfully opportunistic finish in what was probably his one real chance of the match. This defeat was against a team that had struggled consistently to score goals and had come off a 0-0 draw against Malta, where their clean sheet was maintained due to a large measure of good fortune.

That this is just the last of what has been a series of bad results and embarassing performances surely means that the board has to make a decision about the managership of Sven. The defeat against Norway was plain embarassing. The win against a Welsh side that has not had a victory in 11 competetive matches was completely unconvincing and achieved only with a world-class stop from a John Hartson header, and with England under the cosh for much of the last 15 minutes. There can be absolutely no excuses for losing to Northern Ireland. Not even the injury crisis in defence, nor lack of preperation or anything like that. It is an absymal, shameful result, even more so for the way in which England performed.

This is not to take credit away from the Northern Irish team who were terrific on the night, giving even last bit of sweat, will and determination that they possesed. But this merely exposed an England side that seemed to lack any bit of fight, and whose players often seemed to lack any inkling of what they were supposed to do. A manager's main job is to prepare a team tactically for the match, and Sven's preperation against Norway were a joke, his 4-5-1 against Wales utterly ineffective and his team against Northern Ireland looked as if they didn't have the slightest idea what on earth they were doing. This goes beyond persistent criticisms of some of his strategies - from playing Gerrard in a holding role where his vision and skill on the ball is wasted, to leave Rooney running down the flank instead of letting him run through the middle of the park wreaking havoc with the defence. The last three English performances lacked tactical acumen, direction, discipline, determination, spirit and bite.

England certainly has many questions to answer. One cannot even imagine them facing the likes of Japan or South Korea or any of the African qualifiers in the World Cup and winning playing even remotely like this, let alone Brazil and Argentina. Somebody has got to take responsbility for the debacle that was Northern Ireland and if England do not turn the corner very very quickly, there is no doubt who that person will be.