What on earth is up with Rooney and co? Friday night's performance was staggeringly, mysteriously bad. The papers are full of theories. Many of the diagnoses are rooted in tactics: we need to play Gerrard in the centre or Cole on the left. There's also a lot of stuff about England's baffling attitude (or lack of it). Are they nervous? Cracking under pressure? Or just lazy?
Having not read or heard anything that convinced me I turned to James Hamilton, who blogs at More Than Mind Games. Hamilton is a true original. A sports psychologist, writer, and football obsessive he offers a vastly informed, idiosyncratic and often startingly acute take on sporting matters. His analysis of England's non-performance (anti-performance) against Algeria does not disappoint. It's by far and away the most convincing explanation I've read.
In his view, the players have been "on psychological strike"; that's to say, they've been playing badly as a half-conscious protest against a manager they've fallen out with. Capello's disciplinarian, distancing style of management worked well during the qualifying campaign because the team knew they had failed the country in 2008 and that a drastic corrective was needed. So they were happy to be "punished" by being made to fight for their places in every game. When the final squad was picked, they expected that to be over - they thought they'd passed the test, jumped through the manager's hoops, and would now be ushered into Capello's confidence. But when they got to South Africa they discovered that things were as they were before. Capello still seemed to thrive on their uncertainty, and would still barely acknowledge them as grown-up men. All of this was brought to a head by the appalling treatment of the popular Robert Greene, left to swing for a week before being cut down. And so, on Friday night, the players expressed their frustration with Capello in the most powerful way they could - by not performing for him. Perverse, self-destructive? Yes - but aren't we all from time to time? Hamilton concludes:
It’s not pressure. It’s not nerves. It’s not fear. It’s a message to Capello, and it reads f*** off.
The upside of this is that I suspect they've got this out of their system now. They will turn inwards, towards each other, and recognise that if they don't do this, it's not Capello who will suffer the most, but them. The parallel is with France, four years ago, who rallied around each other after falling out with their manager and went on to reach the final.
Let's hope so anyway.
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