and a hard place
David Lacey Soccer
Tottenham Hotspur fans used to believe Glenn Hoddle walked on water. Unfortunately he shared that belief which is why, as England coach, he has suddenly vanished at the deep end.
The feeling with which Hoddle apologised this week for any offence he had caused disabled people was heartfelt, but by then the Football Association, engulfed by a tidal wave of public opinion, had no option but to sack him.
So now the Ice Man cometh. Howard Wilkinson, a 55-year-old Yorkshireman, is about as passionate a football person as anyone would wish to see taking care of the national squad, but to the outside world he is coolness personified and wears an almost oriental inscrutability. As a caretaker his pauses will be Pinteresque.
So far David Platt (32), a laid-back, multimillionaire Mancunian, has not been mentioned in official statements but he has shown he can work with Wilkinson during a spell in the Football Association’s coaching department. When he was playing for England, moreover, he impressed journalists with his common- sense approach to the game and his lucid views on modern tactics both at home and abroad.
Wilkinson’s immediate brief is to pick a squad for next week’s friendly with France but for England the more crucial game is the European Championship qualifier against Poland at Wembley on March 27. If they fail to beat the Poles, a place in the play-offs could be their only hope.
For those now in charge of the team, and for any yet to come, Hoddle could hardly have gone at a worst moment. England’s chances of qualifying for a major tournament are stronger than when the Football Association invited Ron Greenwood to take over the squad, after the defection of Don Revie to the United Arab Emirates in 1977 – less than a year before the World Cup in Argentina – but the margins for error are narrow none the less.
In his autobiography Managing to Succeed, Wilkinson declared: “International management in this country is blighted by difficulties that are virtually insurmountable. The England manager is simply set up to be shot down, with no sense of realism or perspective applied by his critics.”
Hoddle could not have put it better and would probably have put it a lot worse. Yet no England coach should lose his job simply because of a poor vocabulary. On that basis Alf Ramsey would never have been appointed. Bad judgment and bad timing have been Hoddle’s nemesis.
When he first alluded to reincarnation in a BBC radio interview last May, it caused barely a ripple of comment because the nation was more intent on seeing England win the World Cup. His damning quotes in Saturday’s Times, however, found a public far more ready to condemn than forgive and no amount of protestation could get over the fact that Hoddle, by his admission, had not been misquoted.
In any case the media knives were already unsheathed. The last time Hoddle enjoyed support from a large majority of his critics was when he left Paul Gascoigne out of the England World Cup squad. Once the World Cup began the balance of press opinion shifted against him.
Big tournaments have found out more hardened England managers than Hoddle and the 1998 World Cup exposed his lack of experience. Although the manner of England’s departure provided him with a reasonable plea of mitigation, his insistence that the full team would probably have won not only the match but the tournament was bizarre.
Once the emotions of St Etienne had died down, moreover, people remembered that England would not have been playing Argentina but for the defeat by Romania in Toulouse, which was the result of bad defending on the field and Hoddle’s lopsided approach to the game. There was a case for not playing the 18-year-old Michael Owen straightaway but leaving out David Beckham was crass and the reason given for it, some half-baked notion about not being focused, even more so.
In other circumstances Hoddle would probably have been allowed to regard England’s early homecoming as part of a learning process. After France, however, England’s poor performances in the Euro 2000 qualifiers suggested Hoddle was losing the attention of some of his players.
Yet the 2-0 win over the Czech Republic in a friendly appeared to give him a three-month breathing space, and next Wednesday’s encounter with France was designed to raise spirits for the Poland game.
On the football side, then, there was no reason for Hoddle to go. But ever since Michelle Drewery brought her 18-year-old limping Spurs boyfriend home to Mum, he has become increasingly involved in matters which would never live easily with his position as England coach.
Eileen Drewery, he believed, had cured his hamstring injury by “absent healing”. The two have maintained a close acquaintanceship ever since and Hoddle was set to be a director of Drewery’s proposed clinic, the Lychgate Sanctuary.
The Football Association could live with the healing and could swallow Hoddle’s extravagant declaration, in his ill-judged World Cup diary, that his only mistake in France had been to leave his healer behind.
But once Hoddle declared last September that Drewery would become an issue if the Football Association tried to bar her from the England set-up – “I have used her at each of the clubs I have managed and her results have been very positive and beneficial” – he had made himself a hostage to fortune.
When Hoddle took the England job his strength of resolve, and refusal to be swayed by criticism of his teams and tactics, were seen as assets so long as the results were right. Once the World Cup started these became examples of his stubbornness and arrogance.
But the stubbornness of his faith in Drewery has brought him down. Perhaps he is a martyr to his conscience. A pity his healer could not double up as an elocutionist.
Bad judgment and bad timing have been Hoddle’s nemesis. This time the knives were already unsheathed.