Why England failed?

England came into this World Cup with so much of hype and self-belief that they can win it this year. Somehow when they played, their performance on the pitch did not reflect that. They were poor in the group stages, but still managed to win two and draw one.

Then against Ecuador in the second stage, again it was the same tale of poor play and woeful performance.

They once again started the game against Portugal today with Wayne Rooney playing alone upfront. The idea was that the excellent midfield players will somehow find through balls for him to score a handful of goals.

This was the strategy against Ecuador and then it failed. Today, once again, that strategy failed big time and left the England management team with a lot to answer for.

I thought today they let Rooney isolated upfront and started pumping long balls to him, hoping that he could somehow get the ball and then run straight at the Portugal goal.

In reality, Rooney was not getting anything and he had to chase for the ball most of the time. Think about this okay. Here we have a player who has just returned from injury, playing just his second full game and yet the manager plays a system where the player is expected to run around on his own, win the ball and score a goal. Sven Goran Eriksson must be dreaming. Rooney is good , but he is not that good!

So what happened next is easy to predict. Rooney is bound to get frustrated. We all know his temperament and the Portuguese players were there to wind him up. You get the picture surely. I am the least surprised Rooney was red-carded in the 62nd minute.

Mind you, the England players showed so much character in defending stoutly and playing counter-attacks for the remainder of the normal time and the extra time. And I thought Owen Hargreaves was simply superb tonight.

And when it came to penalties, once again we somehow knew that the English never had the luck of the grass to win a shoot-out. So they have crashed out of the World Cup now and I am sure expert pundits will start to conduct post-mortems on the team performance.

In that line, here are my two cents worth of what went wrong and why England never looked like winning the World Cup. My conclusion is simple. The fault lies with Sven and here’s why:

• He should not have picked Rooney after he had broken his foot. Instead he could have taken with him at least two or three other proven strikers. Names like Jermaine de Foe, Darren Bent or even Dean Ashton will surely ring a bell to most England fans. I think the England players started to believe that they can play better only when Rooney is in the team – that was a wrong perception.

• Okay, since he had taken Rooney along, he should not have put so much pressure on the striker by playing him as a sole front man. Any player returning from injury is not going to be sharp and Rooney proved that. He never had the time to settle into the team. I think he was pushed into the firing line too soon.

• Sven should have stuck to his 4-4-2 formation. I don’t understand why he was experimenting at the World Cup. He should have known his best formation and his best team even before the tournament. The 4-1-4-1 obviously did not work for England. All along England had played in the 4-4-2 formation and the players were comfortable with that. When Sven changed his formation, I thought the players were simply confused. Just look at today’s game. Hargreaves was supposed to be the holding midfielder but then time and again we still saw Gerrard and Lampard coming back to defend when they should be up front helping Rooney.
  
  I think the formation changes were made to cater for Owen to play alongside Rooney and then when Owen was injured, the system was in place to suit to Rooney’s game.
  
  The flaw here is that Rooney is not a striker. He plays well to feed another striker but with Owen out injured, did we have another natural striker to partner Rooney? Peter Crouch is not one but at least he does the job for you.

• If that is the case, why wasn’t Crouch playing alongside Rooney in the last two games? Well that’s because some fool had been telling Sven that the team plays long ball with Crouch in the team. Hey, did you watch the game today? Or the one against Ecuador? Crouch was not in either of the matches, but England was still punting the ball up towards Rooney!

• Finally, why did Sven take Theo Walcott and Jermaine Jenas to Germany? Walcott is a striker and even with some striking problems, he never played. Surely some other proven striker could have done the job alongside Rooney tonight.

These are just some of the issues that I have with Sven. Sadly however he will not be answerable as he is out of the job now. We will never know why he made these strange decisions. Was he trying to be different to win the World Cup or was he influenced by some powerful player lobby? Perhaps an autobiography in the future will reveal more.