The Monday Miscellany

If this were one of those brilliantly whimsical columns in one of the Guardian’s floppier supplements, it would end with the line, “This week, Mike Martin has been watching season four of Waking the Dead, listening to Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters by The Twilight Sad and reading Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson.” With due respect to Trevor Eve and the Kilsyth quartet, it is the book that has been most illuminating.

Apart from anything else, it is interesting that, in the earlier stages of the piece, the overseas nations discussed most seem to be Austria, Hungary and Uruguay. Three nations ranked among the best in the world up to the 1950s; along with West Germany, they were all World Cup semi-finalists in 1954, with Hungary favourites to win the tournament. A final, incidentally in which Germany’s ‘defensive’ 3-2-5 formation won out against Hungary’s adventurous 2-3-5.

Hungary were quarter-finalists again in 1962 in Chile, and again with Uruguay four years later but neither have been world powers since the 50s. Austria have also been on a steady slide but made the second group stage in the World Cups of 1978 and 1982, spearheaded by the individual brilliance of striker Hans Krankl and defender Bruno Pezzey.

Today, if Hungary, Austria and Uruguay all failed to qualify for the 2010 World Cup hardly anybody outside the country would bat an eyelid. Hungary and Austria are also serial absentees from the European Championship and can be counted among the most enthusiastic supporters of Michel Platini’s expansion of the tournament to 24 teams from 2016. Their populations, around 10 million and 8.5 million respectively, are not particularly good excuses when you consider the success of much smaller countries like Croatia.

Such is the cyclical nature of international football. Portugal are now regarded as a major player in the world game but have qualified for the World Cup just four times; just twice in the twentieth century. Even France, winners of the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000, missed out on the sport’s biggest competition four times out of seven from 1970 to 1994, most notably when a last minute Bulgarian goal at the Parc des Princes in November 1993 kept them out of the departure lounge for the USA, having already been humiliated by Israel in the same stadium in their previous match.

At World Cup level, there is a small elite of five countries – Brazil, Germany, Italy, Argentina and France – who have contested the last seven World Cup Finals to the exclusion of all others. Merely add the Dutch to that list and you can go back another three tournaments. Beneath, there is, to put it mildly, chaos. Never has the race to qualify for a World Cup been so competitive, particularly outside Europe. Anybody who thinks they can predict the five African qualifiers this time around is playing a mug’s game. More countries than ever before have sides making significant strides forward.

Which makes finding football’s next superpower harder. After the 2002 World Cup the USA were tipped by many for future success but were hopeless in Germany 06. Senegal, like the Americans, made the last eight but haven’t even reached the final qualifying round this time. Not only is footballing fortune cyclical but it gives no respect to recent success. From 1986, one of the four World Cup semi-finalists has failed to make the following tournament at all; France, England, Sweden, Holland and Turkey. Portugal, semi-finalists in 2006, are struggling to make it to South Africa.

There are good cases for predicting future success for Russia, Nigeria, Ghana, Australia and others but there are equally good arguments for stating that there simply won’t be another superpower for decades. Pelé predicted an African side would win the World Cup in the twentieth century but we are still waiting even for a semi-finalist. The problem for the up-and-coming nations is that there are a lot of other up-and-coming nations as well and there can only be one winner.

One of the reasons for Africa’s failure to live up to its potential in World Cup terms is that, often, the wrong teams qualify from its unpredictable preliminary campaigns. Cameroon have one of the best players in the world in Samuel Eto’o but he was conspicuous by his absence in 2006 courtesy of an injury time penalty miss by Pierre Wome in the last match against Egypt. Togo and Angola were, with respect, never going to do the continent justice.

Don’t, meanwhile, look to China, India or Pakistan to gatecrash the World Cup party any time soon. They may have the manpower but even now they are simply miles short of the quality required even to make the last stage of qualifying. China have regressed dramatically since they qualified for 2002, when they were aided by the absence in the preliminary tournament of co-hosts Japan and South Korea. They were simply the best of the bad bunch remaining. Asia will not provide a World champion any time soon because those countries who qualify regularly are not driven to raise their standards by a difficult qualifying tournament.

In fact, despite the chaos of international football, it can confidently be said that the next team to win a World Cup for the first time will be Spain, which will scarcely be regarded as a surprise result. And that is only because they have managed the extraordinary achievement of failing to win one so far. For Austria and Hungary it is simply a matter of waiting for UEFA to print more invitations to their smaller but cooler party.

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I say cooler, because there can be little doubt now that winning the Euros is an achievement at least the equal of winning the World Cup. When Germany reached the World Cup Final in 2002 they did so by beating an abysmal Saudi Arabia, drawing with Ireland, then winning matches against the mighty Cameroon, Paraguay, USA and South Korea. Tournament winners Brazil faced Turkey twice, China, Costa Rica and Belgium; England were the biggest obstacle in their progress to Yokohama and even then didn’t put up much of a fight in the quarter-final in Shizuoka. For Spain to win Euro 2008 they had to beat Russia twice, then Sweden, Greece, Italy and Germany.

By comparison with the statistic above, the last seven European Championship Finals have involved ten countries, double the World Cup’s equivalent figure. Twice during that time, three consecutive Finals have involved six different teams. The European Championship is more open to new winners such as Denmark and Greece than is the World Cup because the big teams turn up with a more challenging to-do list.

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It doesn’t matter whether Chelsea employ a man-marking or zonal-marking system when defending set pieces. If their defenders persist in their current approach of standing still and watching the ball move past their heads in the vague belief that the man behind will clear it, they will continue to leak goals. It’s not where the players are standing that’s the problem, it’s what they’re doing. Or not doing, as the case so often is these days.

Take the Southend goal on Wednesday night; what exactly was Alex doing, half-heartedly wafting a foot at the flighted corner as Adam Barrett arrived to power a header into Petr Cech’s goal? Not even the most supple high-kicking burlesque dancer would have reached the ball. Alex’s error brought to mind the comical moment when Sol Campbell’s attempt to head a ball below sea level directly led to Macedonia taking the lead against England in Skopje in a Euro 2004 qualifying match.

I wrote last week of John Terry’s failure to execute a simple headed clearance from Patrice Evra’s cross that allowed Wayne Rooney to rush in and score the second goal in Manchester Utd’s 3-0 triumph but that was just one example of many. If Chelsea win nothing this year their hesitation in their own penalty area will be one of the main contributing factors.

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Outcry this week over the reported £500,000 wage Manchester City will pay Kaká. Don’t worry, it won’t happen. Where has the figure come from? Not from City, nor Milan, nor the player, who appears wholly embarrassed by the whole shebang. It is, so far as I can make out, little more than mischievous conjecture. Consider; if Milan really were about anticipating receiving a king’s ransom for the player, would they have risked him against Fiorentina on Saturday?

I won’t be surprised if Kaká does leave the San Siro club in the next six months but all this week’s goings on may simply be a method of eliciting a more realistic bid from Real Madrid, Barcelona or Manchester Utd. And none of those clubs would be daft enough to spend the figures reported as being offered by Manchester City, whose owner would appear to have more money than sense.

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What’s this I see? A casual glance at the Premier League goalscoring chart and there are Englishmen everywhere. Agbonlahor and Lampard on nine each; Defoe, Gerrard, Crouch and Owen on eight; Bent and Carlton Cole on seven. Heck, even Shola Ameobi has scored a couple. With Wayne Rooney injured, Fabio Capello would appear suddenly to have an embarrassment of riches ahead of England’s friendly against Spain in Seville next month.