Blaming the wrong people

So England fail at another football tournament and once again the finger of blame is being pointed at the manager.

The national team is increasingly becoming little more than a sideshow for these overpaid youngsters, just like it is for the seniors

Admittedly, the performance by the Under-21s at their European Championships was truly pathetic, even by English standards. Losing all three group games without scoring a goal in open play is failure of the highest order.

But is Stuart Pearce really to blame for England’s latest football disaster?

England entered this tournament as one of the favourites to win it. They stormed through qualifying and won their last nine games without conceding a goal. In fact, until this month, they hadn’t lost a match since November 2011.

That doesn’t sound to me like a manager who doesn’t know what he’s doing. On the contrary, it sounds like someone who’s got his team nicely gelled and ready to go.

Yet they got to the big stage and completely crumbled.

Admittedly, many of the players who had played a part in that undefeated run were not available to Pearce in Israel. The likes of Jack Rodwell, Phil Jones and Jack Wilshere, for example.

But there still should have been enough talent left in the squad to at the very least get past the group stage.

Yet they didn’t. And to me, that is down to the players, not the manager.

I didn’t watch all three games, but just about every report I’ve read says the same thing – the English players took to the field looking utterly disinterested.

Rumours have been circulating that the general feeling in the dressing room throughout the contest was one of the players simply not wanting to be there.

And I think it is the players’ lack of passion, pride and patriotism that is the real reason behind England’s constant failure.

I can pretty much guarantee you that if you put any one of those players in a game for their club side over the last week they would have played their guts out. They would have covered every blade of grass in an effort to show their manager they should be starting games in the top flight come August.

But the national team is increasingly becoming little more than a sideshow for these overpaid youngsters, just like it is for the seniors. And, in this particular case, a sideshow that was eating into their summer holidays.

Can Pearce really carry the can if he had a squad made up of players who would rather have been lying on a beach somewhere, comparing babes, Bentleys and bling?

I have no doubt that Pearce is a great motivator, but even he wouldn’t have been able to gee up players who just didn’t want to be there.

I’m not saying the manager is entirely blameless, of course. Ultimately, what happens on the pitch is his responsibility, and this is the second tournament in a row in which England have crashed and burned.

There has also been a lot of criticism of his tactics too, with England abandoning their style and resorting to the long ball when their backs were to the wall.

But I think England fans, myself included, need to kick this habit of forever blaming the manager when the Three Lions come up short.

At some point we will have to admit that maybe it isn’t always the man in charge that’s the problem but the people he is in charge of.

Undoubtedly, this debacle in Israel will cost Pearce his job, and that is possibly the right decision after two tournament failures in a row.

I just wonder if the players, as they sit sipping their cocktails on their expensive holidays, will feel just the tiniest tinge of guilt when he pays the price for their collective indifference.

Yeah, right.

AVB to PSG?

Rumour has it that Tottenham Hotpur boss Andre Villas-Boas could be on his way out just a season after taking over at the London club.

The former Chelsea manager, who led Spurs to a fifth place finish this season, apparently tops the wanted list at super-rich Paris Saint-Germain. The French club are likely to lose current manager Carlo Ancelotti to Real Madrid, and AVB has impressed them with his work at White Hart Lane.

If this move does happen, and it is little more than newspaper speculation at this point, it will cap a remarkable turnaround in fortune for AVB, whose reputation was severely damaged by his ill-fated spell at Stamford Bridge.

After that failure, people were wondering if what he achieved at Porto was a case of beginner’s luck. But his relative success at Spurs seems to have made him, once again, the hottest managerial property in Europe.

Of course, if he is headhunted by the Paris team it will leave Spurs in the rather uncomfortable position of having to find their third manager in three years. Not what Daniel Levy had in mind, I’m sure, when he gave AVB the chance to rebuild his career.

I wonder what the odds would be on Harry Redknapp making a sensational return to Tottenham? Stranger things have happened in football…

Red mist twist

As a footballer you can earn yourself a red card for all sorts of weird and wonderful reasons. And over the years I have followed the game I have heard of some pretty bizarre ones.

But last week there were two that really made you sit up and take notice.

The first involved former Liverpool midfielder Javier Mascherano, who was dismissed for kicking a medical assistant.

The incident happened when the Barcelona midfielder was injured while playing for Argentina against Ecuador in a World Cup qualifier.

Reports suggest he was driven from the pitch on one of those motorised stretchers that looks like a golf cart. And it was the driver of said cart that was on the receiving end of Mascherano’s kick.

Maybe he asked him for a signed Real Madrid shirt or something…

The second incident was in Argentina itself, where a lower league game was interrupted by a dog getting on the pitch. One player decided to take matters into his own hands, grabbed the dog by the neck and threw him at the metal fencing surrounding the pitch.

Not only were the crowd appalled by this random act of cruelty, so were the players, and a mass brawl ensued and the referee ended up sending the dog-thrower from the pitch.

I swear it’s almost like footballers sit at home dreaming up new and unique ways of earning their marching orders…

Genuine fans suffer again

Sticking with South American football, and Argentina in particular, where last week the country’s authorities took the unprecedented step of banning away supporters from all football matches.

It was a move that came in the wake of the death of a fan during a match between Estudiantes and Lanus, when rival supporters clashed outside the ground.

Argentina has long had a hooligan problem, but the situation has started getting worse recently, with organised gangs running the show.

But while the football association have to be commended for at least trying to do something about the problem, you have to wonder whether this ban will have the desired effect.

Those intent on causing trouble will still travel to games even if they can’t get into the grounds because, let’s face it, they are not really there to watch the football anyway.

And, according to what I have read on the subject, the majority of incidents take place in the streets surrounding the stadiums, rather than in them.

As usual, in this type of situation it is the well-behaved, football-loving majority who are paying the price for the actions of the mindless minority.

Sounds painfully reminiscent of English football 30 years ago…

sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com
Twitter: @maltablade