England Over the First Hurdle

Did you really expect anything more? For anyone unfortunate enough to remember back the eighteen months to our last meeting with Andorra, it becomes plain that these matches are not what we hope for.

We sit back, ready to see our national heroes embarrass the tiny nation of Andorra to death with a 13-0 drubbing.

What we get is the stalest 2-0 win you are likely to see.

The population and wage difference stats have been done to death. The match records are only compared to evoke pity. They mean next to nothing. All you can glean is for England not to win the team must have to suffer some sort of natural disaster.

There is no guarantee, however, that it will be massively convincing.

They did win though. 2-0. We seem to feel cheated though that nobody had it in them to bust a gut to claim a glorious, thumping, break-neck win over, er...Andorra. Even the player out to prove his international credentials, Theo Walcott, took his foot off the pedal after a bright opening.

This made it an exceptionally frustrating match to watch and some will complain that they did not take the opportunity to rack up a good goal difference, but this criticism will be redundant if the players approach every game with a similar sense of professionalism.

"Professionalism? What professionalism?" I hear some cry.

To explain—it cannot be argued that this is not a "job done" scenario. No alarm bells need be rung. The defence was not even marginally tested but England were sloppy and wasteful upfront and in midfield and, on the whole, played within themselves. They did, however, leave with three points.

Would we sleep better had it been 7-0? Would the players leave the pitch brimming with confidence? No. The players, if they have any sense of perspective, will know that there is very little to take psychologically from beating a minnow, whether it was a scrape or a thrashing.

Zagreb is our next destination, and as professionals the players will naturally up their game. This is not to say I am confident they will win, merely that I know they can.

Football does not work in a mathematical fashion. If, say, we beat Croatia 2-0, it does not then follow that we will beat their opponents this evening 5-0 because they won 3-0.

This is obvious, but most fans seem to lose sight of the fact that, in international football, the only thing that matters is win, lose, or draw.

Back to tonight's game, among the players who put in a decent shift, a special mention must go to Joe Cole who was his same explosive, reliable self. It is a struggle to remember a game in which he has been a let-down for England and he is the least-hyped member of Chelsea's neo-"untouchables".

The goals would have come without him, but it is testimony to his character and class that he was the only one to make it look easy.

Let's be glad we have three points and remind ourselves not to bother tuning in next time we play a sub-top 100 national team. It wastes valuable time we could be using to fret over club matters.

I'm sure a certain Mr. Carragher would agree.