We had learnt, and in 2008 we were European champions again. That night I recalled a text Roy had sent me about six months after he left the club. ‘Rooney and Ronaldo will win you the European Cup,’ he wrote. Not a lot of people were giving us a prayer at that time. But he knew, as the manager did, that we had a squad full of outstanding players. And one borderline genius in Ronaldo.
Steve
I PLAYED IN five tournaments for England, which is something to be proud of, but there have been times when I reflected on my international career and just thought, ‘Well, that was a massive waste of time.’
Sorry for sounding sour, but my best mate got butchered in 1998, then my brother in 2000. The whole lot of us got it in the neck at other times. Sometimes we deserved it, but playing for England was one long rollercoaster: some ups and downs but also quite a few moments when you’re not really sure if you are enjoying the ride.
It should be fantastic. Representing your country should be the best moments of your life. But there is no doubt that too many players spend too much time fearing the consequences of failure when they pull on an England shirt. The best managers – Terry, Sven in his early years, Capello in patches – have banished those fears for periods, but it doesn’t take much to go wrong before the dread comes flooding back.
I was really struck by one meeting Steve McClaren organised with Bill Beswick, the sports psychologist, and the whole squad. I saw young players really affected, terrified of what was in front of them. A few of them were saying they weren’t enjoying England at all. The team wasn’t winning and they were getting slaughtered by the fans and the media.
Many supporters will argue that players need to be stronger than that if they want to play for their country. And perhaps they’re right. But after my fourth international against Norway, I picked up the
Sun
and saw I’d been given 4/10. ‘Nervous wreck,’ it said. ‘Totally out of his depth.’ I actually thought I’d played well! I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t start doubting myself after that, particularly as a young player. Terry Venables rang me up and said, ‘Honestly, Gary, I don’t know how they’ve seen that. Don’t worry about it.’ But it’s not easy to shrug off when you are inexperienced and haven’t developed a thick skin.
You can’t overestimate the impact the media can have at the national level because you’re far more exposed playing for England than for your club. The criticism can eat into your confidence, and then the fans get influenced by the media. I’ve seen the cycle at work. You are loved at first, a fresh face on the scene. Then they start finding flaws. Then you are OK again, then you’re past it, then you’re valued for your experience, then you’re finished. You should be tested playing for England, but some players struggle to get through that first dip. Have a bad start and they’re on to you. And every time we don’t win a tournament, it becomes a disastrous failure. We can never just lose. Someone has to be blamed.
This lurching rollercoaster was most violently demostrated with Becks. From one year to the next he could be superhero or arch villain. Boo him, love him, boo him again. Make him captain, strip him of the armband. It was like a soap opera in the national jersey. It was embarrassing. You might get the odd bit of dissent at United but never the crazy hysteria.
A healthy edge of nerves at club level would become fear at national level – a fear that if we lost the world was going to end. Too many players were frightened of what would be said or written about them, of making a mistake. And in my time we never got together a group of players who could quite cast off those inhibitions.
We got closest at Euro 96. We were a whisker away. We played close to our peak and had a squad, and manager, capable of winning a major tournament. Perhaps in 2004, too, but were we ever really a Golden Generation? We had some good players, and a few great ones. Cole, Rio, Becks and Gerrard could have played in any international team.
Steve is undoubtedly a world-class player and I wish he’d played for United. In fact I went on a personal tapping-up mission at Euro 2004 when I knew Chelsea were trying to take advantage of Liverpool being in turmoil.
‘Come play for United,’ I said one day when we were in the hotel. ‘The fans will take to you in no time.’
He just laughed. ‘I’ll do it if you go to Anfield.’
He’s a top, top player, Steve, but he has never quite shown how good when playing for England. Is that down to him, to the managers, to the expectations, or to the fact that we never had a great team around him?
You could write a whole book just trying to answer that question, but I think it involves several factors, on and off the pitch. For example, there’s no doubt that the FA mishandled managerial appointments, letting Terry go way too easily and appointing Glenn Hoddle and Steve McClaren before they were ready. But would any manager in the world have turned us into England’s first trophy-winners since 1966?
We had good players, a few great ones, but I’m not sure we ever had the depth of talent, or the right sort of players, to be consistently strong at international level. Because we win trophies galore for our clubs, people seem convinced that we should be winning with England. But they overlook how much our clubs have benefited from the foreign stars sprinkled through the Premier League.
I think the situation is changing and improving but we just haven’t produced enough players of the right technical and tactical quality. That’s easily proved by the very few times we have held our own against top-quality opponents. Holland in 1996 is pretty much the standout match, which tells its own story. We stood toe to toe against Argentina in 1998. We beat a couple of poor German teams, at Euro 2000 and in Munich in 2001. At Euro 2004 we didn’t play badly against France and Portugal but we didn’t exactly put them to the sword either. There were so many games when we were chasing shadows, incapable of controlling possession or tempo. There were so many times when I was playing for England and thought, ‘This is what it must be like coming up against United.’
The FA can help far more than they do. I don’t want to damn an entire organisation, but take Geoff Thompson, the chairman during most of my England years. He only ever sought out one conversation with me. Did he want to pick my brains on World Cup preparation? Or ask how the FA could help behind the scenes? No, Mr Thompson wanted to know why I didn’t sing the national anthem. ‘Gary, we’d rather appreciate it if you joined in,’ he said. I had to politely explain that no disrespect was intended, I simply preferred to spend those few minutes, as I’d done all my career, focusing on the match. And that was the extent of my dealings with the chairman of the FA.
The FA has a lot of great staff behind the scenes doing their best to make sure the squad gets the best possible preparation. We never had any complaints about facilities. We had top hotels, our own chef. We never wanted for anything.
But when it comes to grand strategy, the FA has not been blessed with dynamic leadership. There’s been a lack of real substance at the top addressing the bigger issues of player and coach production.
We’ve not had a coaching philosophy, and we’ve needed one to eradicate all the damage done through the eighties by the Charles Hughes approach to football. With the European ban after Heysel, we lost our way altogether. We became obsessed with power and direct football.
Howard Wilkinson is a decent man who had some success as a club manager, but he ended up dictating coaching policy and the youth set-up without any real experience of European methods or philosophy. His way was very much the old English style.
We’ve got Trevor Brooking, but he’s banging his head against a brick wall and has struggled to drag the game forward. It’s good to have a true football man involved at the FA but you have to give him more clout. Everything at the FA seems to take a lifetime. They’ve finally started working on a National Football Centre, but it has taken years.
The FA needs dragging into the twenty-first century. It’s been like the House of Lords for too long. When you think of the FA, who do you hear speaking out for the good of the national team? Who do you trust to be making sure we are doing everything we can to win a World Cup?
I scored my only goal in an England shirt in my very last competitive game. Shame it was in the wrong net. It was that crap night in Croatia in October 2006 when the wheels came off the Euro 2008 qualifying wagon. I rolled a backpass to Paul Robinson and then turned to move upfield. The first I knew about the bobble was when the crowd roared. I turned round to see the ball trickling into the net.
It was a bad trip from start to finish. The coaches sprang 3–5–2 on us a couple of days before what was a massive fixture. I know Terry Venables, Steve’s right-hand man, had always wanted to be tactically flexible, but I wasn’t comfortable. We’d just come off a bad 0–0 draw with Macedonia and we hadn’t had enough time to prepare.
As a player, you like to be able to visualise a game, to have an understanding of how you are going to play and what you need to do to counter an opponent. But I just couldn’t get a handle on what was expected from me at right wing-back. I hadn’t played there for ten years. I told Phil before the game that I was worried about it. And that was no frame of mind for such a crucial game.
I didn’t know if I was capable of delivering what the team needed on the night. And it was clear a few of the other players were just as unsure as me. Jamie Carragher had come in as left centre-back, but he never looked comfortable either.
The biggest problem was that we lacked pace and penetration. With me and Ashley Cole as wing-backs, we weren’t exactly set up to cut Croatia apart. We had no width high up the field to provide support for Rooney and Crouch. Carrick, Parker and Lampard were tripping over themselves in midfield. We were slow and predictable.
We deserved to lose, and I saw more mistakes in selection watching from home when Croatia came to Wembley for the return. I couldn’t understand why Owen Hargreaves wasn’t playing. With an opponent like Luka Modric off the front, it was made for him. Steve went with Gareth Barry. It didn’t make sense.
I’d play one more game, a friendly defeat by Spain at Old Trafford in February 2007, but that was my lot. Because of my ankle injury I wouldn’t have gone to Euro 2008 even if we had qualified.
I felt sorry for Steve. I hoped things would work out for him. I knew he was a good coach and I thought he could thrive in international football. The players respected him and it seemed a very shrewd appointment to have Terry alongside him. But managing England is a monster of a job.
I liken it to being a goalkeeper at Old Trafford. If you have any insecurities, if you aren’t confident in your work, it will kill you. I’ve seen goalkeepers eaten alive in that penalty area because they have too much time to think, to fret over what they should be doing. England managers are the same.
Steve is a really good coach, but sometimes with England managers coaching is the smallest part of the job, and that must have been difficult for someone who loves to be out working with the players.
It would also turn out to be a mistake dropping Becks, Sol Campbell and David James from his first squad. We could all see what he was trying to do. He was trying to start a new regime. But to drop Becks altogether didn’t make sense. He was never going to become a bad influence – that’s not his character. He’s not going to be a cancer in the dressing room. He just wanted to play.
Becks rang me with the news, and I was shocked. Very shocked. They were three big calls, and with hindsight Steve would have been better leaving it for a few months and seeing what he needed. He ended up recalling Becks, but by then he was under big pressure.
Steve was criticised in the media for being too chummy, but I wouldn’t say that at all. Yes, he organised the occasional dinner with groups of players, but it was well-intentioned. There was a long time between matches and Steve wanted to go through his thoughts and make us feel like we were all in it together. I thought it was a good idea, but that all becomes irrelevant when you don’t win your big matches.
I would have one more call-up under Fabio Capello, in June 2009, for the trip to Kazakhstan. That’s a long way to go not to play. I never made it on to the pitch, and a few days later I sat on the bench as we thrashed Andorra 6–0, but I liked what I saw around the camp. Training was sharp and focused. Capello didn’t tolerate lateness or slackness in any way. A couple of players were late for a stretch and he pulled them up. Someone had a mobile at lunch and he snapped. On the training pitch, everything was ‘quicker, quicker’. He was pushing people even when warming up. There was a real focus in training.
I was impressed with everything he did, which made it even more bizarre when he became so erratic in the build-up to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Even the way he named his squad seemed chaotic.
He brought in Jamie Carragher instead of Wes Brown, who is quicker and more suited to international football. Then he rang up Scholesy the day before he was about to announce his squad having not spoken to him for two years. He left out Walcott who had been an ace in his pack, even if he hadn’t had a great six months. Then he called Phil at Everton, totally out of the blue. It looked desperate.
In the World Cup he never recovered from it, and made the biggest mistake of all. I’ve been advocating 4–3–3 with England for years and I couldn’t understand why Capello didn’t turn to it. He went with the traditional two banks of four, and it looked predictable and out of date. I’m not saying we’d have won the tournament with better tactics, but we’d have got closer than we did. We might not have been overrun in midfield by the Germans and we’d have kept hold of possession. As soon as Capello switched to 4–3–3 in the Euro 2012 qualifiers the team looked a much better shape. Why didn’t he even look at that formation a year earlier?
But for injury I’d have been out there myself and would have won well over a hundred caps. There was a spot at right-back for quite a few years. To be blunt, there’s a spot there today. Instead, I fell one short of Kenny Sansom’s record of eighty-six for a full-back, though overtaking him wouldn’t have meant much to me.
The truth is I was honoured to play for my country and I would have loved to have been part of a successful team. Winning the World Cup with England would have been incredible. The country would have come to a standstill; there’d have been millions out on the streets. It would have been bedlam.