UFO Info Week-End

First it was supposed to be against Mexico then against Colombia in New York

First it was supposed to be against Mexico, then against Colombia in New York. Both fell through and Ecuador were hurriedly arranged as replacements. Out of action for months, Ecuador did not even have a coach; the Under-23 manager Polo Carrera was promoted especially for this game.Before the game Luxemburgo worked hard to protect himself in case his team disappointed. Football, he emphasised, was the only team sport where the best side did not necessarily win.

“Who would have thought,” he said, “that Turkey would beat Germany or Wales would win in Denmark?”Brazil’s coach needed a convincing win to restore his credibility, and Ecuador’s goalkeeper came to his aid. Ulises De La Cruz had just pulled the score back to 2-1 when a succession of blunders by Espinosa presented Brazil with three goals inside 10 minutes. Relieved as he was with his first win, Luxemburgo is well aware that future tests will be much stiffer.. GLENN HODDLE had isolated England’s main problem even before the game against Luxembourg began. On the eve of the match he said: “Players have to take more responsibility for getting past defenders.” Obviously. But the only one who did it on the day was a defender, Rio Ferdinand, and, for the moment, the only one who has the ability to do it consistently is Michael Owen, whose international career could benefit if his role was changed for the sake of England’s thin European Championship hopes.

Owen is indisputably an uncommonly talented goal snatcher, but in the present era of negligible midfield talent his parallel facility for carrying the ball from around the halfway line right up and into the opposition’s penalty area and finally delivering a shrewd pass is a commodity England cannot afford to ignore.
Given that his partnership with Alan Shearer has not yet shown more than tenuous signs of becoming telepathic (indeed against Luxembourg Shearer sometimes looked on the point of telling him to “go away”) and his appetite for work is making the sullen captain look comparatively apathetic, it would make sense to extract the best out of Owen’s youthfulness, enthusiasm and skill on the ball by making him the creative orchestrator of the side. After all, waiting for Paul Gascoigne to dry out is not a serious option and David Beckham’s game is more to do with power than exceptional ingenuity, as is that of Paul Scholes, while Jamie Redknapp has yet to answer Hoddle’s familiar plea for someone to take a game “by the scruff of the neck”.Curiously enough the games against the leaders of the championship group, Poland and Sweden, will almost certainly provide greater opportunities for an imaginative player operating centrally behind Shearer than we saw against the ultra-defensive Luxembourg side.No doubt Hoddle would prefer to believe that Beckham, Scholes or Redknapp will be capable of exploiting that chance, but in reality the more likely situation is that England will still be in desperate need of a player who can turn a match with a change of pace or a clever forward pass of the quality Owen and Shearer so conspicuously failed to receive on Wednesday. To say, as Hoddle attempted to do, that the reason for that was the absence of Paul Ince was to overlook a bad-tempered player’s tendency to off-load the ball rather than pass it constructively. The meeting of minds overcame the obstacles presented by the schedule clashes with racing on Saturday afternoons when cricket will be switched to Channel 4B, the digitalised channel already available to four million viewers via cable and satellite.Contacts between Michael Jackson, chief executive of Channel 4, and Terry Blake, marketing director of the ECB, date back a year when Four showed a mild interest in screening next year’s World Cup. An extra marketing budget of pounds 13m for grass-roots cricket helped to swing the balance, along with Channel 4’s promise of early evening highlights and a weekly cricket magazine programme to be shown on Saturday mornings.

The Channel 4 bid, at pounds 50m, was only pounds 4m higher than that of the BBC, but ECB officials liked the wider perspective the Channel 4 team offered on the broadcasting of cricket and their commitment to promoting the image of the sport on the streets. Both cricket and Channel 4 desperately needed to shift ground. But only with the departure of Mike Miller, the former head of sport at Channel 4, ironically to become head of sport at the BBC, and the mid-summer arrival of Nick Kennerley from Transworld International, initially as Miller’s deputy, did the idea of bidding for domestic Test cricket take root.
In the end, the difference between the BBC and Channel 4 was not cash but philosophy. The need for the ECB to stop the national summer sport from descending into the same realms as kabbadi and American football gave equal impetus to the rapid sequence of events.