So, it all starts tomorrow, and Fabio says that he already knows his starting England 11 for Saturday’s match against the US. The squad seems to have overcome their dreadful opening days in South Africa, when they lost captain Rio Ferdinand to a training ground injury.
Fabio Capello led his team through a near faultless qualifying campaign and certainly if they’d been able to launch their Finals run straight away, they would have been in a very strong position, qualifying much more convincingly than teams such as Argentina, France or Italy. But, what’s happened in the intervening months? England certainly have a number of top international players, but just what sort of form are they in?
Half of the squad have had ultimately disappointing seasons – acutely so in case of the Liverpool trio Gerrard, Johnson and Carragher – and few of them, with the exceptions of Wayne Rooney, James Milner and third goalie Joe Hart, can be said to be in top form.
Capello’s 23, however, is made up of a surprising number of London players, 11 in all, four from champions Chelsea, five from buoyant Tottenham and two from strugglers West Ham.
The Chelsea contingent (Ashley Cole, Joe Cole, Frank Lampard) are the group who on the surface look in the best nick, having swept all before them with the club’s first league and cup double. Behind the celebration, however, all of them have their distractions. Joe Cole has announced he is leaving Chelsea and is yet to sign for another club, Ashley Cole is in the process of the messiest and most public of divorces, and Lampard is apparently being wooed by old boss Jose Mourinho to join him at Madrid.
And then there’s John Terry.
Terry’s season has so far included an affair with a team mate’s partner, being stripped of the England captaincy, seeing first mother, then father in court and running over a club official in his range rover. Not to mention lifting both the Premiership Trophy and the FA cup…
The two West Ham players, Robert Green and Matthew Upson, by contrast have had a fairly calm season, only having to endure a nail-biting premiership survival campaign that went to the penultimate weekend.
If these six players have had draining seasons which might leave them tired and jaded, the other five London players may well be key for England. None of the Tottenham five – Crouch, Defoe, Lennon, Dawson and King – could have been absolutely confident of making the World Cup squad six months ago. All have forced their way in over the last months of the season and all must be desperate to carry on the sort of form they finished the season in. They are all on the crest of a wave and must be gagging to carry on riding it.
Form may be only temporary and class permanent, but in a six-week tournament having five players in the form of their lives at the right time may be just the thing Fabio would do well to turn to. Echoes of another London club supplying the core of another World Cup campaign?
