Where’s The Party?

“THIS is the best team I have ever had and I have always said we can win it in 2006.” So says Sven Goran Eriksson on the back page of the Star.

While we wonder what Sven would be saying were he not leaving his job as England coach after the tournament (“We are building a team. Yes. They could be good. Yes. We hope to win. Who knows? Yes. Don’t tell Nancy”), he calls for a party.

“At the end I hope there will be a big, big party in England for a month.”

So do we all, Sven. You can imagine the wonderful scenes as England fans join hands and perform the world’s longest “Berlin Wave”, named in honour of Peter Crouch celebratory dance at the World Cup Final.

That’s the dream. And who would have believed it a few months ago when Crouch was being booed by sections of England’s fans. Now, not only has Sven developed a personality but Crouch has mutated into something papers call a “national treasure”.

The Guardian looks at England’s unlikely hero, a man it describes as being “half-man, half-ladder”. A player so “exceedingly nice” that we learn that the 6ft 7in striker used to apologise to the opponents he tackled.

That’s nice. Crouch might even be nicer than Wayne Rooney? The Mail has a picture of the player on whose metatarsal the weight of a nation’s hopes and dreams rest.

The photograph shows Rooney enacting a sliding tackle on teammate Ashley Cole. This sounds like a risky move for someone being nursed back to full health. And it would be had Cole not taken a leaf from the Crouch book of fair play and stepped out of the way.

So long as the opposition leave Rooney alone, resist the urge to stand on his foot, things should go well go well for him.

But maybe it’s too much to expect Rooney to jink past the opposition like a heifer on skates, score a hat-trick in each match and bring the World Cup to England?

Writing in the Express, former Charlton manager Alan Curbishley says he can’t help but feel sorry for Rooney. “Everybody will be waiting for him to pull on the shirt of his country and become some kind of superman”, something Curbishley sees as unreasonable.

But why? Cometh the hour, cometh the man. And Rooney is England’s best player. Well, he was before Crouch emerged from the clouds…

Posted: 10th, June 2006 | In: Back pages Comment | TrackBack | Permalink