David James won his 24th cap against Japan on Tuesday — not bad for someone whom Gordon Banks once described as a ‘nightmareâ€.
Playing at the City of Manchester stadium guaranteed him a warm reception and his recent difficulties were forgotten. Strange to relate that over the past two seasons the England goalkeeper has been relegated with West Ham and then come close to a repeat with Manchester City.
Playing behind such porous defences, James has had plenty of opportunities to show how vastly improved he is since his butterfinger days at Liverpool. The argument, however, about whether England are in safe hands is probably best left undecided until after the team’s last match in Portugal.
Sven-Goran Eriksson is known to have a few reservations, even if we know enough about England’s coach by now to appreciate that he would never dream of airing such views in public. He could hardly have been more fulsome in his praise of James this week and rightly pointed out that the 33-year-old has never made an error in an England match that has led to a goal.
The alternative view, of course, is that James is an accident waiting to happen and the best of a bad bunch. It speaks volumes, for example, that of the 20 Premiership clubs last season the five with English goalkeepers — Wolves, Leeds, Leicester, Everton and Manchester City — finished in the bottom five positions.
Eriksson’s other two goalkeepers, Ian Walker and Paul Robinson, were relegated with Leicester and Leeds. Richard Wright, a substitute at Everton, is on England’s standby list only because Nigel Martyn, the first choice at Goodison Park at 37, had informed the Football Association he did not want to forgo his holiday break and risk fatigue when the chances were he would be only a back-up player.
The responsibility, therefore, falls to a man who, as well as earning the moniker Calamity James, once admitted he never practised dealing with crosses in training and blamed late-night computer-game sessions for lapses in concentration during matches.
‘The problem in the past was that everything was taken for granted,†James said this week. ‘A lot of people believed I was capable of becoming England’s No 1 and playing at the highest heights and I took it for granted without doing the hard stuff, which was to work at it. Now I’ve taken on a psychologist, new dietary habits and I’m training properly.â€
James is willing to admit he has benefited from playing in a country where the top league has three goalkeepers from the United States, two from the Republic of Ireland and Finland and one apiece from Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Denmark, Australia, Northern Ireland, Poland and Trinidad and Tobago.
‘When you look at the league we have got only four or five goalkeepers,†he said. ‘It’s a concern, of course. When you have so few in the Premiership it’s getting increasingly difficult to get a bedrock of good English keepers.â€
Looking ahead to the opening match against France, England’s players are entitled to take hope from the perceived vulnerability of Marcel Desailly in defence for Les Bleus and the idiosyncrasies of Fabien Barthez in goal. In France, however, James’s fallibility and the absence of Rio Ferdinand have been identified too.
‘I’m confident,†James countered. ‘As much as France’s offensive play is phenomenal, they are prone to letting goals in. We have to come up.†—