The retirement of Paul Scholes from international football is one of those shocks that quickly makes sense. The image flashes to mind of an exhausted midfielder tottering off after only 57 minutes of his final appearance for England, the defeat to Portugal in Euro 2004.
The occasion was an emblem of the demands made of such a player and of his intermittent difficulty in meeting them.
These tournaments turn into torments, in particular, for a man whose metabolism could not deal with humidity in Japan or heat this summer. Had he stayed on, the next couple of years might have been spent wondering about the weather forecasts for Germany in June 2006 that might have determined his fate in the next World Cup finals.
The effort to fit in with England, of course, goes far deeper than meteorology. It says everything for Scholes’s rich talent that Sven-Goran Eriksson kept on affirming that he could not imagine an England line-up without him even as three arid years without a goal for his country went by before he scored against Croatia. Scholes seemed to have an ideal talent for football at that level, but in other respects it did not suit him at all.
Though he had the good manners to talk this week of ‘wonderful†times with England, he certainly did not delight in being, latterly, on the wide left of Eriksson’s midfield. After the game with Switzerland in Euro 2004 the manager reported that one member of his leading quartet for that area would have preferred a diamond formation. No mole was needed to confirm that it was Scholes who wanted to be nearer the middle of the attack.
The Manchester United player, though, does not sulk and his announcement this week must be about more than a tiff over tactics. An ever-adaptable Eriksson could easily have reached some agreement with him during the past month in which they have talked about his desire to walk away. At heart, Scholes is probably gone because he does not feel a yearning for the international scene.
That does not betoken any lack of patriotism, just a deep attachment to one piece of England.
When the hypothetical idea of a move to Chelsea was put to him by a journalist, Scholes reacted as if some sort of threat had been hissed at him. Born in Salford, pledged to United and known to take his son Aaron to Oldham games, it gives him no pleasure to stray too far from the territory that made him.
Insiders tend to think of him as being marginally superior to David Beckham in a great Old Trafford generation of footballers. Comrades as they so often were, one might still characterise Scholes as an anti-Beckham. The England captain adores the international team and responds to the glitzy ambience to such a degree that his display in, say, the 2-2 draw with Greece rankled at United because he did not touch those heights with them.
Scholes, shying away from anything that smacks of glamour, is relieved by the familiarity of the single club he has known. As his period with cosmopolitan England stretched out, he simply seemed to grow less comfortable. He is a player with the statistics of unease. There were nine goals to go with his first 19 caps and only five in the subsequent 47 appearances.
The scoring had dried up long before the debate about midfield diamonds ever started.
It was in United’s colours that everyone saw instantly why the professionals have such reverence for his skills. A quick mind sizes up situations and also lets him dart into situations that sharpen a move or let him find the net himself. There was only one result last season that United minds will linger over and it was Scholes who drilled in the goal that handed Arsenal their sole significant domestic defeat, in the FA Cup semifinal.
Perhaps he supposes such scenes will be likelier in future if, with England behind him, there are more rest periods built into his programme.
Scholes detached himself from Eriksson’s team on the same day that word came through of Pavel Nedved’s inclination to give up playing for his country. The Czech is dispirited by his injuries and there is a further difference between the two players. Nedved’s 32nd birthday comes at the end of this month, but Scholes does not even turn 30 until November.
Troublingly, the United midfield is going at the same ostensibly premature stage as another leading England player of modern times. Alan Shearer also put international service behind him when he was still 29.
Every interpretation of these decisions is unsettling. Does England’s kind of football really wreck men to such an extent that they seek respite so soon? Or could it be that the players, 38 years after the World Cup win, do not really suppose they risk missing out on glory with England by confining themselves to their clubs?
Either way Scholes, despite those wan spells, will be missed by his country. People have fretted about the balance of the midfield but, without him, they may shortly notice a gaping hole in it. —