SOME SENSE AT LAST

Daniel Taylor in the Guardian:

Football in the 21st century is an industry where managers have the technology to know the exact distance a player has covered in a match, the speed at which he strikes the ball and a forensic breakdown of passes, shots, tackles and runs.

There is no computer, however, that can get inside Wayne Rooney's head and, as long as this is the case, nobody can be certain how he combines being the cleverest footballer in England while auditioning to be its most dim-witted.

Rooney, as Eriksson requested yesterday, will not need to go into hiding, as David Beckham did after France 98, nor will he find himself being described as "public enemy No1"' or the "most reviled man in English football". Those descriptions are being applied instead to Cristiano Ronaldo, his club mate, Portugal's No17 and a convenient scapegoat when the English public does not really want to fall out of love with its best footballer.

Ronaldo has so many unpleasant traits it is very easy for him to be cast in a more villainous role, regardless of whether it blurs the facts. Rooney was the victim of an ambush, it is even being said, as though Ricardo Carvalho had agreed in advance that his testicles could be used as a landing platform. Utter nonsense, of course, and it was refreshing to find Sven-Goran Eriksson refusing to join the bandwagon.

Rooney needs to grow up, and fast. Rooney has become the prime example of a sportsman who allows himself to get so hyped up it takes him out of the zone and adversely affects his performance. Sports psychologists call it the "catastrophe theory". Laymen might describe it as losing the plot.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that Sir Alex Ferguson's handling of players with persistent behavioural problems seldom stretches to anything more imaginative than bawling them out, traditionally followed by a period of silence and then the arm-round-the-shoulder treatment.

The Professional Footballers' Association had recommended Rooney seek more expansive help after his outbursts during and after the Northern Ireland match but Ferguson, as old-school as they come, was said to be furious, believing it to be a matter for the club and not the players' union.

The fact, though, is that in the course of 20 months Rooney has been sent off in a World Cup quarter-final, picked up his first red card and an FA disciplinary charge for Manchester United, been substituted in a friendly against Spain to save him from early dismissal and, going back to the defeat in Northern Ireland, been caught on camera on the pitch mouthing off at David Beckham in abusive terms before apparently launching into Steve McClaren in the same fashion in the dressing room.

The evidence is of a man whose brains are in his boots. This combustible genius should look at himself before pointing an accusatory finger at the more streetwise Ronaldo.

Richard Williams in the Guardian:

In the aftermath of a punishing defeat, no man should be called to account for his impromptu remarks. But when Frank Lampard said on Saturday night that England had "deserved" to win the match in which defeat had just eliminated them from the World Cup, he was inadvertently exposing the problem at the heart of the team's consistent inability to scale the highest peaks.

David Beckham had used the same word earlier in the campaign. England would get to the World Cup final, the captain said, because they "deserved" to be there. Since no deeper analysis was forthcoming, his listeners were left to infer that the evidence in support of his contention might have included any or all of the following: England's historic role as the game's mother country; the vast popularity of the Premiership at home and abroad; the inflated pay and celebrity status of its players; and the attention lavished on the public appearances of their wives and girlfriends.

When Sven-Goran Eriksson also spoke about the team "deserving" to reach the final, he tried to suggest that it was because of the quality of their football. Strictly on the basis of their successive performances against Hungary, Jamaica, Paraguay, Trinidad & Tobago, Sweden and Ecuador, however, it would have taken a battalion of the world's finest legal advocates to make a case for the justice of their arrival in the final rounds of the biggest international football tournament of all.

The attitude represented by the words of Lampard and Beckham represents a culture of complacency at work, and it could be seen in the climactic shoot-out against Portugal, when three of England's penalty takers failed with attempts in which the slackness of their body language and their shooting spoke of men who were ready to put their trust in the belief, as England players have believed for several generations, that their reputations alone would be enough to ensure their success.

Where, on Saturday, was the Englishman prepared to take control of the game as Zinédine Zidane would do in France's defeat of Brazil later that night? The only candidate was Owen Hargreaves, who both converted his penalty - the one Englishman to do so - and secured the man- of-the-match award with 120 minutes of non-stop tackling, intercepting, running and passing.

Alone among his colleagues, he displayed a dynamism that seemed to come from within. What also makes him unique among the squad, of course, is that he has never lived in England. The two things may not be unconnected.