To draw 0-0 at home to Montenegro is not a good result by most international football team's standards. But what hurts most as an England fan is to see the dice that are thrown to try and resolve the situation. At no point in international football should a player like Kevin Davies be relied upon to nick you a goal.
Footballers like Davies, Emile Heskey, Zamora and Carlton Cole, have all been turned from lithe, pacey and somewhat prolific strikers into hench, elbow-wielding lumps designed to play the majority of the game with their back to goal. They concede more free kicks than they score goals. Other than Alan Shearer (who would always turn and shoot anyway), I can't think of another England generation that relied on these players. They preferred the likes of Sheringham, Linker, Ian Wright, Gascoigne and Beardsley. Les Ferdinand or Mark Bright never got much of a look in despite prolific domestic form. They just didn't have enough... skill for the top level. How times change.
Perhaps the Premier League has something to answer for here. They made these centre forwards this way. I remember when Kevin Davies played on the wing at Chesterfield, and scored goals too.
It's much easier to beef up and be a battering ram of a centre forward than shoulder the goalscoring burden, and for many teams having a player like this can help you out-think a defence at set-pieces. But at the top level the flaws of these guys are found out. You have to worry that young prospects like Andy Carrol or Connor Wickham, a teenager displaying enough touch, skill and eye for goal to grace a good Premiership team, will be moulded the same way.
So maybe Capello is playing to what some Premiership managers would deem our 'strengths'. But the fact is that in today's England side, players with the potential to be genuine creators are marginalised, and this is what holds us back against the best teams. Ashley Young made an exceptionally rare start against Montenegro, but Jack Wilshere sat the whole game out. Adam Johnson didn't make the world cup, neither did Theo Walcott. Gabby Agbonlahor may not be the best example, but it is still telling that a player who has pace and likes to run and shoot has been overlooked for almost two years.
No other top international sides seem to have this negative attitude towards centre-forward play. Spain's strikers are all midgets, the South American's mostly weigh 6 stone 7. Even Scotland leave Chris Iwelumo out more often than not.
Big centre forwards with the ability to score goals for fun - Drogba, Shearer, Mark Hughes, are incredibly rare. We have only one player who comes even close to this level in Peter Crouch, and picking anyone else to play the big number 9 role is simply defeatist. If we can't give players the chance to do what they are good at, and instead force them into a role that it is assumed we need to play, then we are going nowhere, and it won't be long before the excitement of being a goalscorer is extinguished altogether.
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