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High time Steven Gerrard moved from comfort zone with England


(Graham Hughes)

By the left: the deployment of Gerrard in his favoured central role did little in the long run to benefit England or McClaren in the Euro 2008 qualifiers
Martin Samuel

Steven Gerrard is a brilliant player, but he cannot start on the left of midfield. Brilliant, but he does not like it on the right, either. Brilliant, yet uncomfortable behind the striker. Brilliant, but obviously cannot play in the same team as Frank Lampard. Brilliant, but he must have Gareth Barry beside him. For such a brilliant player, Gerrard’s champions spend an awful lot of time telling the world what he cannot do. Almost as much as they expend detailing the precise conditions in which he must operate: in the centre, like Roy of the Rovers, with the England team built around him. Now there was a chap who tried that. Oh, you must remember him. Ginger lad, nice smile, carried an umbrella. Not been around for a while.

Gerrard is a brilliant player — heaven knows Liverpool would be lost without him — and it is for precisely that reason that Fabio Capello is using him to address a problem on England’s left that was only half-solved by the arrival of Joe Cole. This is still a work in progress, as well it might be with one full training session to prepare for the match with the Czech Republic, but Capello has considerably longer to get his players ready for the game in Croatia on September 10 and they should know the system better by then.

It needs time. As usual, though, the moment a plan does not go like clockwork from the outset there are calls for it to be abandoned. It took Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, a reasonable while to perfect 4-3-3 with Wayne Rooney coming in from wide. Got there in the end, though, didn’t he?

Asked about Gerrard’s sinister new role, Capello bristled and said that England played 4-3-2-1 against the Czechs with Gerrard forward behind the striker, not 4-4-2, with Gerrard on the left of midfield. We have been here before. This is the Christmas tree formation used by Terry Venables against Holland at the 1996 European Championship. So I asked Venables to settle the argument over the way England played.
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He said he did not think Gerrard was required to operate as a conventional wide midfield player, but he didn’t recognise a Christmas tree. If it was, he said, it would have been very lop-sided, because Rooney kept going out to the left, where Gerrard was, leaving a void on the right that David Beckham did not have the legs to fill. So fine-tuning is needed, but at this early stage we should expect that. What is not useful, however, is the predictable chorus of disapproval that greets the attempt of any England manager to move his players an inch beyond their comfort zone.

Gerrard scored the winning goal for Liverpool on Saturday, and it was triumphantly pointed out that he was deployed in central midfield. His shot, however, came from the edge of the penalty area, slightly to the left of centre: exactly the sort of position Capello wants him to occupy. The fact is he could have scored that goal from any starting location because the crucial matter is not where Gerrard starts, but where he ends up. It was argued that England looked good against the Czech Republic only when Gerrard came inside, but this misses the point. Gerrard is meant to come inside. He starts left but from there his job is to link with the forwards as quickly as possible; quicker than on Wednesday night, actually.

Now, that might be a result of Capello’s caution, or his, but it represents the germ of a good idea. Either way, what is the point in employing Capello if he is not allowed to change our thought processes? What is the point if he is limited by our lack of imagination, our straight-line football culture? The moment a performance is less than perfect we cry for our security blankets: 4-4-2 and Gerrard in the centre. Well, we played 4-4-2 with Gerrard in the centre last year and England were knocked out of the European Championship. That is why Capello is here, remember?

The middle is too congested (this is the reason it took Liverpool 94 minutes to win against Middlesbrough at home on Saturday). Gerrard is arguably England’s most talented midfield player and will be more difficult to resist if he is coming in from a wide position. Rafael Benítez, the Liverpool manager, has been reluctant to use him in the heart of midfield for the same reason and it will be interesting to see what happens when Javier Mascherano returns from the Olympics. In previous seasons, Benítez has preferred guarding central midfield players and Gerrard high up the pitch, with less traffic between him and the goal.

Roy Race was a cartoon character. In real life a footballer, however talented, cannot run through the entire team to score. After the match against Andorra in Barcelona, in which Gerrard scored twice, Steve McClaren, the former England head coach, guaranteed his place in the centre of midfield. How many goals did he then score for England from that position in the rest of the campaign? None. His only subsequent goal came against the United States in May, under Capello.

The manager is trying to help Gerrard, not kill him, as Harry Redknapp, the Portsmouth manager, suggested. He is trying to deploy him in an area of the pitch that will make him more dangerous. In doing so, he seems to have greater belief in Gerrard than many of his devotees, who clearly view him as a precious little hothouse flower, one that must have the environment completely to his liking to grow. Gerrard is a much better player than that; and Capello knows it, too.

Ferguson sold on the idea

Mikaël Silvestre is the first Manchester United player to be sold to Arsenal in 34 years. That can mean only one thing. Either Sir Alex Ferguson does not fancy Arsenal, or he does not fancy Silvestre: probably both.