For a player already a little short on confidence after warming his club’s bench for a few games, it must be heartening to hear his national manager single him out as the only player under threat for his place in his country’s World Cup squad.

I’ve never believed that Sven Goran Eriksson was anything other than the football coach’s equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes and once again Sexy Svennis shows us all just how little he really knows about man-management and motivation, as if England’s often dire on-field performaces under him haven’t already shown us.

Sven picked Jermain Defoe out for the special kind of pick me up only a vote of no confidence can give and threatened Defoe with being left out of the World Cup squad because “if someone is injured or not playing many games and it stays that way, it doesn’t give me a chance to see whether they are in good shape or not.”

Jermain is obviously the only England squad regular suffering by sitting on the subs bench or from injury at the minute because if there had been others then surely Sven would have mentioned them. No mention of his golden boy Michael Owen who has been out with injury and will barely be match fit by the time the finals come around? Surely an oversight on Sven’s part. Maybe he’s forgotten the injury that sidelined his captain before the last World Cup when he insisted on still playing an obviously unfit David Beckham in Japan/South Korea and saw his World Cup dreams come crashing down around him.

Personally I can’t wait for Sven to be relieved of his job at the FA. His conniving, stealthy way of operating, his overreliance on his chosen group of Special Soldiers, his propensity to appear more in gossip columns than on the football pages and most of all his undeniable attempts to disrupt players at their clubs has grown wearisome and even an unlikely triumph in Germany this summer won’t make most football fans forget just how over-rated Eriksson has been.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 5:41 pm and is filed under State Of The Game Opinion. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.