by TraP » Wed Jun 16, 2010 6:23 pm
GILES SMITH'S MIDWEEK VIEW
Posted on: Wed 16 Jun 2010
Chelsea fan, columnist and World Cup blogger Giles Smith returns for very special midweek view.
England's first match of the tournament was, for fairly obvious reasons, a bit of a sickener for Robert Green, but I also wonder how Joe Cole might have been feeling at the end of the evening.
True, he hadn't chosen an occasion of widespread national interest to tumble over an Andrex-soft shot, thereby lining himself up for a potential lifetime of caustic ribbing around the grounds of England. In fact, Cole hadn't even been seen.
But that's the point. Bad enough for Joe that, when Fabio Capello finally got round to telling everybody who was going to be playing, James Milner was selected ahead of him. Even worse, though, that when Milner proved groggy, manifestly out of his depth and, ultimately - with a yellow card to his name - a liability unsustainable beyond 30 minutes, Capello replaced him with Shaun Wright-Phillips.
A wounding blow that, surely, for Cole. A wounding blow, in fact, for anyone. I suspect all of us have occasionally, down the years, felt affronted not to have been given the nod ahead of Wright-Phillips, whether at international or club level. But we've bitten our tongues and got on with it. What else can you do?
In the event, the Manchester City player's contribution was typical: lots of scampering about to no particular effect, a handful of inefficient passes, and one wild, 25-yard crack at goal when an entire catalogue of more sensible options was open to him.
All of which, of course, could end up working in Cole's favour. With that hour-long performance, Wright-Phillips has, presumably, made himself unpickable for England from here on in, by any rational analysis, except in a situation of the direst emergency, involving a great swathe of the squad being laid low by fever or, perhaps, a passing elephant. So Cole, one assumes, now finds himself bumped a little further up the running order. Even so, Saturday's proceedings will have given him, if he didn't already have one, a sobering measure of his place in the international scheme of things.
At Chelsea, of course, Cole was always highly rated - by supporters, at least. Very few subs get to bathe in such warm approval while stretching on the touchline. Very few players generate such eager and constantly renewed optimism every time they play. In part this was because Cole came across as a nice bloke, easy to like. It was also the result of a continuous and perpetually thwarted yearning among fans for the player he potentially was, and the player he might become, given another game, a few more starts, a few more minutes…
He always seemed to be far more popular with supporters than with managers, though. And when the managers are good managers, and there is a succession of them and they all seem to reach roughly the same conclusion, you would have to be mad not to wonder, at least every now and again, whether the managers are seeing things that the supporters are not.
Jose Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti, and now Fabio Capello: that's quite a list of top-class coaches who have, to a greater or lesser extent, not felt able to embrace Cole entirely. (Would things have been different if Cole had not been injured throughout Guus Hiddink's short but important time at Chelsea? We shall never know.)
I read one expert suggesting recently that Cole's problem at Chelsea was that he was 'a cavalier among roundheads'. Really, though? During last season's double-winning campaign, the team scored seven goals on a number of occasions and eventually won the league 8-0. I didn't notice much blunt destruction of cathedral windows going on, nor any Cromwellian bus- parking. (Cromwell's roundheads were the very first team to park the bus. Check the history books, if you don't believe me.) On the contrary, cavaliers were entirely welcome - just not, it would appear, the type of cavalier that Cole is.
Can we straightforwardly call Cole a cavalier in any case? I guess the people who do so are in part referring to the step-overs (needless, largely ineffectual and, if we're being honest, pretty irritating most of the time). They may also be referring to the occasional failures to defend properly. I wonder whether Cole's problem at Chelsea wasn't, in the end, about being a cavalier at all, but rather about being a roundhead who thought he was a cavalier.
Now, though, we get to live in fear of him returning to torment us - complete with step-overs. 'And we let him go for nothing,' we'll say - though I would guess that some of us, underneath it all, will be perfectly pleased for him. (He really was that well liked.)
What are the odds, though? Can Harry Redknapp, say, or possibly Arsene Wenger, or maybe even Sir Alex Ferguson, find a consistent solution for him? Maybe. But a lot of good people have tried, and a lot of good people have failed, to make something out of Joe Cole.
Alive or Alive?