The Indie:
As England lurched so unpromisingly towards the last World Cup a single statement from a key player became for some the ultimate evidence of futility. Rio Ferdinand was the author. With the support of Steve McClaren, the man whose shiny new regime, we are told, is already on the way to wiping away the painful legacy of Sven Goran Eriksson, Ferdinand asserted that results were everything.
Performance was not the key to all possible progress - a bad display, whatever the inherent problems it revealed, could be discounted if points were acquired. The consequences of such thinking spread across the football fields of Germany like a stain.
Rejected in the farcical friendlies - the midfield tinkerings which led to the self-imposed exile of the excellent Paul Scholes, the droning complacency - was the principle that teams grow organically. They are not fiddled and fadded into significant existence.
Now Ferdinand is injecting alarm into some old football bones once again. In still another revision of recent English football, Ferdinand has turned on Eriksson, the beloved leader of a tight and self-regarding club just a few months ago, for his refusal to give the team its head. The new England, Ferdinand declares before today's European Championships qualifier against Macedonia at Old Trafford, is bolder, more self-confident - a team off the leash. He is especially delighted to have been handed a "free role" in defence.
More freedom for Rio? It is a bit like filling a diabetic's lunch-box with cream cones. Few leading footballers can ever have been in less need of extra licence than the man who only a few weeks ago almost single-handedly sabotaged Manchester United's return to Champions' League action against Celtic. There has been one almost constantly recurring challenge in Ferdinand's career since he emerged as a youngster of exceptional promise at West Ham United. It has been the acquisition of a genuine defensive discipline, an understanding of his essential duty to prevent rather than create goals.
Yet this week he was talking about the value of the 3-5-2 option and the increased fluency it would create. "I think we've been overcautious in our play - not just in the last World Cup, but in most World Cups. Other teams have thrown caution to the wind a bit - and got good results."
This, frankly, is gibberish. England did not perform so pathetically in Germany because they were too cautious. It was because they were too inept. Because they could not pass the ball from A to B. Because their team tactics might have been drawn up in a cave. Nothing in their two-year preparation for the tournament had suggested that lessons had been learned from the débâcle in Portugal in 2004.