While Chris Coleman prepares to name his initial squad for the Euro 2016 finals, with concern that Gareth Bale is fit, Roy Hodgson and England get ready to trust all in Wayne Rooney. That’s good news for Wales, says Dai Sport columnist NEIL MASUDA.
AS the Premier League season meanders to its denouement and the main prize nestles, a rather lonely figure, in the Leicester trophy room – apart from odd copies of the League Cup – the nation’s attention turns to the Euro 2016 squads.
Chris Coleman will wear that determined look he affects – especially when trying to prise some extra pennies out of the Football Association of Wales, as he has been vainly doing recently – and hoping that the jewels in the Wales crown do not lose their lustre in the run-up to France.
He will be especially attentive of the talisman Gareth Bale, who once again proved his worth, in midweek, by guiding the Galacticos to the San Siro for the Champions League Final against Atletico Madrid.
But perhaps even more interesting in the next few weeks will be the unabashed outpourings of England boss Roy Hodgson, the man whose self-contradictory comments can trip himself up even more easily than Jamie Vardy attempting to gain a spot kick in a West Ham 18-yard box.
Vardy, the England chief assuredly claimed recently, did not dive for a penalty by clipping his own heel and only reacted understandably when he cussed at the referee, who was sending him off.
Vardy, of course, is a late arriviste to the England set-up, which is why he was being coddled by Hodgson.
But then again, Wayne Rooney is the subject of much Hodgson coddling, a player who flatters to deceive by scoring in run-of-the-mill qualifying games and is then hailed by the media as England’s shining light – until he reaches the finals and always fails to deliver. What on earth happens to the filament in his bulb that he turns into one of world football’s dimmest performers?
It matters nothing to Roy – because Rooney is his captain, he says – as if that is justification in itself.
Jordan Henderson is also the captain of Liverpool, but that doesn’t mean the Reds have performed less well in his absence – in fact, the opposite. Henderson, by the way, could also be on the plane to France.
So, Rooney gets another trip to a tournament finals with England when, if the boss had any sense, he would have been watching it at home with Coleen – Wayne that is, not Roy (he doesn’t know the England captain that well).
Rooney will under-perform again and it will be, so he’ll say, because he was played out of position (‘Why oh why did they pick the in-form Harry Kane and Jamie Vardy up front?’).
If England do perform above their usual woeful standard it will not have been through brilliant planning by Hodgson or the game-changing influence of Rooney – it will be because a number of players, many of them from Tottenham and Leicester have just landed in Hodgson’s lap at the right time.
But even then he may contrive to grab defeat from the serendipitous jaws of success by making bizarre team selections or totally inappropriate substitutions at key times. He has previous in these matters.
If England’s FA have any sense, after another Hodgson failure, they’ll save the man who looks like a geography teacher (he was actually once a PE teacher in South London), who never made it to deputy-head, from any more field-trips with his national side.
Whatever the case, Euro 2016 with Roy should be something of a hoot.