“YOU’RE not going to believe this,” David James said, “but there was no Zidane on the video.” The England goalkeeper was attempting to explain why, when the world’s best player creamed that free kick past him last Sunday, he was, like the rest of us, a spectator. Here was why: the video of France at work issued to James by the Football Association in the build-up to the match to assist him with his preparation contained no shots of Zinedine Zidane taking a free kick.
How was he to know, then? Someone argued courageously that this omission was the biggest organisational oversight since 1998, when Glenn Hoddle neglected to run his players through the rudiments of penalty-taking, then watched them lose a shoot-out to Argentina. It sounded to me more like the lamest excuse offered in a public arena since the platform announcer blamed the cancellation of one of my trains on “ operational difficulties”.
First football’s greatest talent ignores the kind of pressure that would kill most of us to rip a gasp-inducing shot over the wall and into the top left-hand corner. Then the Manchester City goalkeeper breaks ranks to jump up and down with his bottom lip pushed out, shouting, “But I wasn’t ready!” He’d have saved it, you understand, if the FA had only done his homework for him. But you just can’t get the staff. Apparently the last person to hire the video hadn’t bothered to rewind it, either. Don’t you hate it when that happens? No wonder James felt he’d been hung out to dry.
Or is there something more substantial in James’s claims? The players cannot, after all, be expected to know everything and maybe the FA’s seemingly detailed attention to the squad’s needs in Portugal has fallen short in this crucial regard. To you and me it might appear that the FA has done all within its power to make the players comfortable for the tournament’s duration.
It has booked them a luxury hotel; it has invited their partners and children along; it has filled a room with pool tables and top-of-the-range arcade games; it has laid on, presumably, all the dot-to-dot books that Wayne Rooney could possibly need.
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The FA even happily accepted — we learnt this week — a relief parcel of crumpets and comedy videos, put together by those thoughtful people at Sainsbury’s, but at the same time it clearly failed to provide an adequate dossier on Zidane and his abilities for those, such as James, whose attention has been elsewhere over the past decade or so.
A number of measures could have suggested themselves. The England players’ training base in Portugal is decorated with giant posters of themselves. But obviously giant posters of the opposition would be more useful from a tactical point of view. Even James, as far as we are aware, has no difficulty recognising Sol Campbell or knowing what he is capable of at dead-ball situations. It’s the more obscure players, such as the World Footballer of the Year, that he feels underbriefed on.
Perhaps a pack of playing cards should have been distributed, in the style of the one the US Government issued depicting the most wanted agents of al-Qaeda. That way the players could have been learning something even as they kissed goodbye to £50,000 incautiously bluffing on a pair of threes in a hand of poker with Michael Owen.
Alternatively, pictures could have been pushed gently under the doors of the players’ hotel rooms every hour or so, bearing informative and inspirational captions such as, “This one’s pretty good” or “Look out for old baldy bonce, because you never quite know what he’s going to do”.
Still, if it falls to a humble newspaper column to pick up the pieces and do the FA’s work for it in a time of national need, so be it. Frankly, my feeling is that the inside information that follows may prove to be of limited application, because if England perform as miserably as they did against Switzerland, they will lose to Croatia on Monday and be back home by Tuesday. But in case that doesn’t happen, and in case, by some freak, England go on to meet France in the final, Zidane is the one covered in sweat with the monk’s tonsure, David. And the word is he’s got a bit of a kick on him, so I’d watch out if I were you.