Lampard rides to the rescue

Share

Somewhere in Machiavelli - reading would be a fine alternative to snooker and mini‑darts - there is surely a line about not telling the enemy you are coming. By the time John Terry had driven the few hundred yards from the tented England media centre back to the team hotel, Franco Baldini, Fabio Capello's No. 2, was already being briefed about the Chelsea captain's call for a show of dissent at Monday night's team meeting. This was an ambush that foiled itself.

Compared with France, England are the Waltons. There is no training‑ground strike, no son‑of‑a‑whore tirade by the chief striker at the manager and no YouTube clip of a coaching assistant flinging his accreditation away after a barney with the captain. Instead smooth Frank Lampard eases into a car to make the journey his Chelsea teammate made 24 hours earlier. Lampard is the clean-up guy, like the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction. JT makes a mess, Lamps clears it up.

By chance (or was it cunning?) Baldini drew lots for England media duties in an order that caused Terry to sabotage his own protest. Had Lampard been prodded on to the trail of tears from hotel to inquisition chamber Monday lunch-time, Terry could have taken Capello by surprise as the team reviewed a DVD of the Algeria game that evening. That way Monday would have floated by with a few nondescript thoughts from Lampard, and Terry could have burst in the following day to describe his role in the uprising.

Instead a docu-drama would have Capello parting the curtains of his room just wide enough to see Terry slide out of the Football Association car and then calling him into an interrogation cell. "John, do you have something to say to me?" By then several senior England players were already in damage‑limitation mode. Their representatives spent much of the afternoon trying to defuse the so-called Terry‑list of agitators, which led some newspapers to portray them the next morning like the Tolpuddle Martyrs. To be associated with a move against an England manager, however well intentioned, is bad for business, and a number of those identified by Terry as being round his table when the players had a beer at the Vineyard Hotel in Cape Town on Friday night were said to be furious that their names had been used without their say‑so.

Not the least of Terry's tactical errors was to volunteer the names of Lampard, Wayne Rooney, Aaron Lennon, David James, Peter Crouch, Glen Johnson, Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard, who, as captain, had most reason to feel aggrieved, since Terry had called himself "100%" the leader, despite being stripped of the armband by Capello, and had issued provocative statements "on behalf of the team". The juiciest of them was: "If it upsets him [Capello]or any other player, so what?"

Over the two days a stark physical contrast presented itself to students of game theory. Terry had entered the marquee sweating. By the time he spoke to newspaper reporters damp patches stained his England polo shirt.

Lampard, on the other hand, was laughing when he first sat down - slightly nervously but laughing. After the fire comes the bucket of water. The more urbane of the Chelsea warriors was here to throw it. "There wasn't a rebel gang," Lampard said while defending Terry's right to be "honest", just as Terry had challenged Capello while claiming to be doing so "for England".

Capello had been warned by Baldini that Terry had made a kind of state of the union address and crushed the revolt before it started by calling the former captain in and telling him his point had been made, and heard, and need not be repeated at Sunday night's gathering. The would-be Churchill was gagged. Meanwhile the gang he claimed to be leading were dissociating themselves from statements made on their behalf, even though many shared his grievances and would have welcomed the chance to tell Capello that the shape of Wednesday's team to play Slovenia needed altering, with Joe Cole coming in to enhance a malfunctioning midfield.

But with Terry silenced, the protest was stifled before Capello pressed play on the DVD of the Algeria game. "It didn't happen," Lampard said of the "clear the air" session, that staple of imploding teams. Terry's patriot games had failed and Lampard was able to cuff away reports of "a rift in the camp which isn't there".

The players watched Friday night's 0-0 draw in Cape Town from above -"which is the worst angle to watch a game because it makes it look really bad," Lampard said. A potential honesty work-out turned into another lecture from Capello, with a few minor concessions. His willingness to name Matthew Upson as Jamie Carragher's replacement in Port Elizabeth was a step towards consensus. For Terry, though, yesterday's meeting must have evoked that great line from The Jam's Eton Rifles: "What a catalyst you turned out to be/Loaded the guns and you run off home for your tea/Left me standing like a guilty schoolboy."

Lampard left no room for doubt today that the debate on team selection and tactics will not be revived this side of the Slovenia match. Capello has re-asserted his sovereignty over the starting XI. These restive England players may see a team-sheet that is more to their liking but not because Terry tried to turn Rustenburg into Cobham, the Surrey training ground where he exerts such influence over the hiring and firing of managers. In a game England have to win to be sure of surviving Capello could not persist with a wooden 4-4-2 formation in which Emile Heskey's presence is rendered indefensible by Wayne Rooney's barren form.

In the early stages of training here Monday Rooney was hardly breathing fire and Terry was solemn. A persistent rumour around the camp is that one or two senior players have been disappointed by Rooney's attitude at this tournament: by his grumpiness, his listlessness on the pitch.

Capello's staff saw a welcome rise in their best player's energy levels last week but against Algeria even his first touch was defective: a sure sign that his body is at odds with his mind. A third consecutive substandard Rooney performance might be sufficient to put England out of this World Cup.

A mystery baffling Capello's staff is why the team's match‑winners are so subdued - Rooney, certainly, and Lampard, too, against Algeria. Gerrard, the best of the three, is never in the attacking areas often enough for him to support Rooney adequately. This impotence explains the desire of the players to add a creative, fifth midfielder (Joe Cole) and dispense with Heskey.

For days now the England camp has been a parallel universe of introspection, ennui, friction between Capello and some players and a good deal of ritual tub-thumping along the lines that "passion" is the least the country should expect from England teams. No one in the compound itself can seem to say why Capello sends the team out to play with "pace and power, getting tight to people, putting on the pressure, showing spirit and guts" (Lampard's words), only to see them ice over in the matches.

Capello squashed Terry's political conceit with no great effort. But the restoration of order left a lot unsaid.