With Wayne Rooney suspended for the first two Euro 2012 games, England have little option other than to turn to a big man
"You don't have to use short passes," Roy Hodgson was heard to tell his England squad during one of this week's training sessions, "not if you use your big man up front." An instinctive shudder of apprehension ran through England supporters with long memories.
Nowhere has the cult of the big, strong centre-forward retained its grip on the football culture more firmly than in England, and nowhere does it evoke such a mixed response. By urging his players to "use your big man" – Andy Carroll, in this case – the new manager seemed to be ushering in a new era by awakening a host of ancient fears.
In a world in thrall to Lionel Messi and the short-passing, small-is-good philosophy of Barcelona, is it wise to put a strapping 6ft 3in centre-forward at the centre of your strategy? Or is Hodgson the only one capable of seeing through a smokescreen of fashionable theory and recognising that the old values of power, pace and directness – embodied by a man whose £35m transfer from Newcastle to Liverpool 17 months ago prefaced an abject collapse in form – can still have a place at the top level of football?
Those English fears can be traced back to the trauma induced by a single event whose echoes stubbornly refuse to fade: a murky afternoon at Wembley in 1953 when the red shirts of Gusztav Sebes's Hungary emerged from the mist to destroy England's finest – Billy Wright, Stanley Matthews and all – with a magisterial performance revolving around the use of Nandor Hidegkuti as a deep-lying centre-forward. Hidegkuti wore the No9 on his shirt but spent most of his time in midfield, a tactic that was more than enough to confuse England's defenders, who had been reared on orthodoxy and were helpless as he found the positions from which to score three of his team's six goals.
England were used to big, bold, line-leading No9s like Tommy Lawton, with his 22 goals in 23 appearances between 1938 and 1948, and Nat Lofthouse, who scored 30 in 33 between 1950-58. Even as Hungary were unveiling the future, England's next battering ram was being readied for action. The burly Tommy Taylor of Barnsley and Manchester United received his first cap in 1953 and was being groomed as Lofthouse's successor; he had scored 16 times in 19 appearances for England when he perished in the Munich disaster, aged 26.
Alf Ramsey played in the 1953 match against Hungary, in which England were shown to have fallen behind not only in terms of tactical organisation but also in the development of ball skills and the use of individual imagination. Ten years later Ramsey took over as the manager of the national team and showed that he had learnt at least some of the lessons. Although he tried a handful of conventional No9s, including Alan Peacock and Frank Wignall, he would win the World Cup with a pair of strikers, Geoff Hurst – a converted wing-half – and Roger Hunt, who hardly conformed to the Olde English stereotype.
Big men who did fit the description came and went during the latter part of Ramsey's reign and those of his successors. The procession of those who excelled in the English league but failed to make a lasting impact on the international scene included Jeff Astle, Malcolm Macdonald, Joe Royle, Bob Latchford, Peter Withe and Paul Mariner, who made the biggest impression with 35 caps and 13 goals. Then, under Bobby Robson, came the centre-forward most reminiscent of Carroll in general approach: Mark Hateley, with nine goals in 32 matches, followed by Alan Smith (the Arsenal one), Kerry Dixon, John Fashanu and Steve Bull before Alan Shearer took over in 1992 and established himself as the first choice of Graham Taylor, Terry Venables, Glenn Hoddle and Kevin Keegan.
Shearer was one of those centre-fowards capable of scoring the perfect hat-trick – right foot, left foot, header – and proved a hard act to follow when he retired with a record of 30 goals from 63 games in eight years. Emile Heskey took over but finished with only seven goals from 62 appearances spread over 11 years, although his unselfishness was appreciated by his usual partner, the more prolific Michael Owen.
An impatience with Heskey's inability to score regularly had coincided with the emergence of Wayne Rooney, encouraging Sven-Goran Eriksson to explore formations that encouraged a more flexible tactical approach, although the Swede also tried James Beattie and Peter Crouch in the No9 role. Crouch, now seemingly cast into international oblivion, has a record of 22 goals in 42 matches, although most of his success came against insubstantial opposition.
Steve McClaren launched Darren Bent's international career in the catastrophic Euro 2008 qualifier against Croatia at Wembley, while Fabio Capello tried the unlucky Dean Ashton and Carlton Cole but felt compelled to recall Heskey for the 2010 World Cup. Carroll made a confident debut in the friendly against France in November 2010, and Bobby Zamora and Kevin Davies were also given run-outs before the Italian resigned in February.
If Hodgson views Carroll as his most potent attacking weapon in Rooney's absence, then he is planning to shape his pattern of play around a man who came into form only in the last month of the domestic season and has a mere three international caps to his name. The Liverpool player scored in his second match, a friendly against Ghana, but his experience of competitive international football amounts to one minute of last September's Euro 2012 qualifier against Wales at Wembley, when he came on for Rooney at the end of a pallid 1-0 win.
The new manager will be given a chance, of course, to test his theories and find a way of deploying his limited resources to the best advantage. It would be optimistic to imagine that he believes he has found an English Zlatan Ibrahimovic, a big man capable not just of intimidating defenders but also of bringing his team-mates into play and scoring goals marked by panache and unpredictability. Carroll has done little to suggest that he possesses the finesse for that role.
But, faced with Rooney's enforced absence from the opening Euro 2012 matches against France and Sweden, Hodgson has to find a short-term fix. Progressives will fear that, to borrow the words of the old Stiff Records slogan, he is reversing into the future. Read More
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