Now that Michael Owen has scored his first goal for Manchester United, pressure to recall him to the England squad will increase. The problem is: who drops out?
It is not the job of Fabio Capello, the England manager, to keep everybody happy. It is not his inclination, either. Peter Crouch started, and scored, in the final England game of last season, a 6-0 win over Andorra, yet was axed from the squad when England reconvened for the friendly with Holland earlier this month. He has no chance of getting back now, after failing to win a starting place at Tottenham Hotspur. Capello likes his players to be playing.
He has the option simply to add Owen to the four strikers he would normally pick for the matches with Slovenia and Croatia, but to bypass tough decisions does not seem his way. And as most international managers chose players like-for-like, accommodating Owen would mean dropping the form striker in English football right now, Jermain Defoe of Tottenham Hotspur.
Terry Venables, the former England manager, said that an international team should be as hard to get out of as
it was to get into: he thought England did not play enough matches to make snap decisions based on a 20 minute substitute appearance in a friendly. Capello favours this philosophy, too. He also takes a lot from training sessions, which is presumably where Carlton Cole crept ahead of Crouch in the pecking order.
This is Capello’s dilemma. Clearly, Cole, physically powerfully and much improved under Gianfranco Zola at to Emile Heskey, who played such an important part in England’s resurgence last season. Heskey is not a prolific scorer but, when he plays, others are, and Capello likes that. There is no direct replacement for Wayne Rooney, aside from forward midfielders such as Steven Gerrard or Joe Cole. Instead, Capello employs variation in the form of Defoe, a quick, natural finisher.
England’s next opponents, Slovenia, are two points behind Northern Ireland in their World Cup qualifying group and nothing more than a warm-up for the game with Croatia the following week. It could be argued that the Slovenia fixture would be the perfect time to reintroduce Owen. Yet to beat Croatia is important: do that, and England qualify for the World Cup in South Africa with two matches to spare. Surely then would be a better time for auditions? Now is the moment to get the team right and the job done.
If there is to be a change against Slovenia, should it not be an attempt to capitalise on the blistering form
of Defoe, whose goals have helped take Tottenham to the top of the league? It would mean abandoning Capello’s preference for a traditional big target man — although Defoe fared better than Heskey in Holland anyway.
Still, if the Tottenham striker does become Capello’s first choice, there could be hope for Owen yet, as his deputy. It is not much, but he cannot return to the England team on reputation alone as would have happened under Sven Goran Eriksson. The days of special privileges for the select few are over and England are better for it.