ENGLAND FALLOUT CONTINUES
Sven-Goran Eriksson and the Football Association are to hold a series of face-to-face meetings with Premiership managers to tell them that he will no longer tolerate the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger having a detrimental influence on the national team.
Eriksson made it clear yesterday that he holds the club managers partially to blame for Wednesday's 3-1 defeat against Australia at Upton Park.
Several, it emerged, had made it clear they would not fully co-operate with Eriksson in the future if he risked their players becoming fatigued or injured by keeping them on for longer than 45 minutes.
The England coaching staff also suspected that some of the senior players, particularly those from Manchester United, were as concerned about avoiding injury and the subsequent wrath of Ferguson as they were about helping England avoid their first defeat to Australia. Rio Ferdinand and Gary Neville were notably among the weaker performers.
The accusation was supported by David James.
"I'm not going to say my mind was focused on anything else, because it wasn't. But I think that, arguably, some people have had interests elsewhere. I don't know. I'm not saying other players' minds were elsewhere, but it could be possible, couldn't it? Yes."
Beckham retorted:
"When you pull on an England shirt, you are not worried about the next game. We have to stamp out thoughts like that straight away."
Gary Neville agreed:
“The young players performed really well. But it didn't go for us. We just couldn't get the ball in the net. But there were no pull-outs or withdrawals for a long while, so people can't say that we weren't taking it seriously.
"We had our so-called strongest team out in the first half, yet it simply did not go our way. People may say we were thinking about our club games - I can assure them that was not the case."
But Eriksson revealed that he substituted the players against their wishes:
"Beckham was the first to come to me to ask to play on. I don't know on behalf of how many he was asking to do it. But I said it wasn't fair and that 45 minutes was enough.
"Of course, they wanted to put right what had gone wrong. I don't know if they wanted to go against their clubs. But as the manager I said it was time for the others to play and they could have their chance again at the end of March."
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