However poor Australia were (and they were), it was hard not to be impressed by the free-flowing football Germany produced yesterday. They started the game at unusually long odds, and ended it being lauded as the best side on show so far.
I texted a friend to say how impressed I’d been with the teutonic team. He agreed – but said he felt that our national team, England, were just as capable of producing a similar performance if lined up in the same shape. The shape in question, as expertly analysed by ZonalMarking here, is a 4-2-3-1 formation which can shift to a 4-2-1-3 in attack. It’s a formation England used consistently in qualifying, with Gareth Barry and Frank Lampard replacing Schweinsteigher and Khedira as the holding midfielders, and Steven Gerrard, Wayne Rooney and one of Aaron Lennon or Theo Walcott operating behind the bludgeon-like Heskey.
With Barry returning to fitness, England have the option of reverting to this system against Algeria on Friday. But even if they do, they won’t recreate Germany’s smooth passing game. There is one vital ingredient missing: a playmaker. Whoever England deploy behind the striker, be that Wayne Rooney or Steven Gerrard, they will lack the canny craft of Germany’s Mesut Ozil, undoubtedly the star of Monday evening’s 4-0 victory.
I’m not disputing that either Rooney or Gerrard are great footballers. But in my opinion, they’re impact players. They’re more “WHAM!BAM!” than “pass+move”. Ozil reminds me of an Arsene Wenger quote about Robert Pires, whom he called “the oil in our engine”. Gerrard and Rooney are more like pistons.
It’s a cultural problem in English football. We obsessed for years about the peroquial ideals of ‘box-to-box midfielders’ and ‘old-fashioned number 9s’. In the meantime, the rest of the world was developing ‘playmakers’ and these things called ‘holding midfielders’. The closest thing we have to the former is Joe Cole, and at the moment he sits behind James Milner and Shaun Wright-Phillips in the pecking order.
England may rack up their own four-goal victory in this tournament. They may even progress further than the Germans. But without a playmaker of Ozil’s calibre – without any oil in the engine – they’ll never match the flowing football of Joachin Low’s side.
[...] first-choice striker we begrudgingly accept won’t score goals, the lack of a winning mentality, a Mesut Ozil style playmaker or a trustworthy goalkeeper. You get the [...]
[...] area, however, England offered no competition at all: that of playmaker. The Germans had Mesut Ozil, one of the tournament’s stars, whilst the England midfield of Gerrard, Barry, Lampard & [...]