Former Arsenal and Chelsea defender Ashley Cole has suggested that selfishness and a lack of team ethos was a driving factor in the failure of England’s fabled ‘Golden Generation’ to break the country’s decades-long major trophy drought.
During the 2000s, England boasted numerous world class individuals all over the pitch, including David Beckham, Wayne Rooney, Michael Owen, Paul Scholes, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, John Terry, Rio Ferdinand and Cole himself. But the Three Lions consistently fell short of success.
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As a team, England managed to equal less than the sum of their parts, rather than more. Midfield was a particularly troubling area of the pitch for successive managers, who could never find the right balance, even after Scholes prematurely retired off the back of Euro 2004.
Cole, appearing as a guest on Stick to Football, hinted that a desire from gifted midfielders to be at the heart of things and not really engage in the more selfless work—such as making runs off the ball—that was also necessary had a negative impact.
“Paul Scholes cannot be the top Paul Scholes with Steven Gerrard in the team because Stevie G cannot be the Stevie G in the team with Paul Scholes. Lampard cannot be the Frank Lampard for Chelsea with those two in the team,” he explained.
“Tactically, we set up to win, but were the players open enough to sacrifice a little bit of themselves? People have to be a little bit more selfless, and I don’t think we were.”
Cole, who played 107 times for England from 2001–2014, elaborated: “Even if I’m just making overlaps to give someone else space, there was no one else in that pocket. When [Wayne Rooney] comes into the pocket … who have we got running behind? There’s no support because our midfielders might want to get the ball from the defenders. It just didn’t work.”
Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard on England duty, 2006.
The Lampard-Gerrard conundrum was never solved. / Michael Steele/Getty Images
The difficulty for managers like Sven Goran Eriksson, and later Steve McClaren, Fabio Capello and Roy Hodgson, was it didn’t make sense not to pick certain players who were the best of the best at club level. But leaving out a big name like Gerrard or Lampard for the betterment of the team as a whole was an enormous decision to have to make, especially if there was a risk it didn’t work.
“[If] you leave out a top player, of course you’re going to be criticised and asked questions, that’s football,” Cole said. “But you have to live and die by decisions that you make. Leaving people out will burn you if you don’t win, but if you win, you’re going to look like a genius in the end.”
Famously, Spain cut national icon Raúl adrift at the age of just 29 in the wake of World Cup frustration in 2006, changing the way they played and then winning the next three major tournaments. At the 1998 World Cup, a victorious France started with the unglamorous Stéphane Guivarc’h throughout because of how he knitted things together, despite failing to score himself.
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