If England are going to win the World Cup, they really need to start conceding some early goals in big games. They've tried the alternative - scoring first against Argentina and Brazil in 2002, France and Portugal in 2004 - and it clearly doesn't work. Indeed, beating Argentina in Sapporo four years ago was the worst thing that could have happened, because it legitimated Sven-Goran Eriksson's belief that the way to beat top teams is through sneaking the first goal, barricading the door and hoping, hoping, hoping to hang on.
It is an approach which is as alien to the average Englishman as subtitled films and teetotalism, but then Eriksson has always been drearily out of sync with the English footballing psyche. He is mild, we are wild. He is retiring, we are in your face. He is a lover, we are fighters.
Or at least he was. For the last month, Eriksson has been so demob happy as to give genuine hope that he might unleash the beast. English football is one the few sporting cultures with the capacity to gather a thrilling, frenzied momentum, within the course of a game or a tournament, that can be unstoppable. Pakistan's cornered tigers did it in the 1992 cricket World Cup; France in the 1999 rugby World Cup semi-final; Manchester United and Liverpool on the way to England's most recent European Cups.
Eriksson may have the bespectacled innocuity and bumbling, genial countenance of a local GP, but England need him find the fever, not cure it. So far, his prescriptions - catenaccio and 4-4-2 without a defensive midfielder - have been as much of an oxymoron as Red Bull and sleeping pills. Besides, if this golden generation are as good as they think, why is there such an obvious inferiority complex anyway? It all makes the smug we-fear-no-one propaganda of the usual bluffers, Rio Ferdinand and David Beckham, vaguely pathetic.
It can be no coincidence that the three most thrilling matches of Eriksson's reign - the 5-1 in Germany, the 4-2 win over Croatia at Euro 2004 and the 3-2 friendly win over Argentina last year - came when England conceded first. At 0-0 or 1-0 to England, the game is still following a programmed pattern. When it deviates from there, all bets are off.
And the sporadic but irresistible force Steven Gerrard comes into play. Without a Hamann or Sissoko behind him, Gerrard has never been at his best for England. Excuses have been naively proposed - the diamond formation, Chelsea's interest at Euro 2004 - but the real problem is Eriksson's pick-the-best-11-players-and-then-the-formation, which has a produced a hotchpotch of a team in which one of Europe's two best goalscoring midfielders has to sit and hold.
If Eriksson is going to play 4-4-2 without a defensive midfielder, he should go the whole hog. Yes, if England try to trade blows with Brazil they will get duffed up maybe seven times out of 10. But if they try and cover up they will get jabbed to a quietly emphatic defeat 10 times of 10. Going gung ho against the world's best sides is an enormous yet justifiable risk. But then Eriksson never takes risks.
Well, he never used to.
