Diamond Jones loses his sparkle
IT WAS the first moment last night in Turin that Phil Jones really looked like he knew what he was doing.
Glancing briefly over his shoulder, chest puffed out, he scuttled importantly backwards 10 yards to take up a position alongside Phil Jagielka.
It was almost as if, having seen centre- back Chris Smalling, below, limp off, Jones was determined to make up Roy Hodgson’s mind.
The England manager could have brought on Gary Cahill to continue the game at centre- back.
But it was clear that Jones felt he should think about bringing on Michael Carrick instead and allowing him to slot back into his more usual position. Thankfully, Hodgson agreed with him.
The plan to come to Italy and play the man Fabio Capello once compared to Franco Baresi at the base of England’s midfi eld diamond quite simply had not worked.
Over the years some of the fi nest minds in football have sought to qualify their very expertise by picking out the qualities in Jones.
“It doesn’t need a trained eye like mine to show what a quality player, even in midfi eld, he is,” said Sam Allardyce in somewhat self- aggrandising fashion when he fi rst experimented with the 19- year- old in the Blackburn midfi eld at the start of the 2010- 11 season.
Mind you, he somewhat presciently added: “We all, myself included, think that central defence will be his natural position in the end.”
Capello, who nevertheless experimented with him in an England international midfi eld against Spain and Sweden over a year later, was equally as quick to promote his own qualifi cations, if not so single- minded as Allardyce.
“Good passes, good solutions,” he enthused. “I know something about football and the solution that he chooses every time when he receives the ball is always the best.”
From the fi rst whistle last night, though, Jones lined up like a player who was constantly struggling to choose between stick and twist.
Not surprisingly, he had his uses defensively. An early pounce here to break up an Italian counter- attack; a timely header there when the hosts tried a more direct route into English territory.
However, he lurched between incidents when the role demanded a bit of scurry and, as a result, seldom offered England’s defenders an option to move the ball forward.
When he did get the ball in a bit of space he strode purposely forward, left two midfi elders in his wake, looked up inquisitively and promptly played the ball straight to Alessandro Florenzi. “It’s not his position – let him be a good centre- half,” Danny Mills wailed to his Radio 5 Live listeners from his seat two along from mine in Turin. He was echoing what all of us were thinking.
So confused was Jones by now that he even forgot the basics – to a critical degree in the 29th minute when he allowed defender Giorgio Chiellini, of all people, to skip around him and cross for an Italy goal.
A clash of heads with Eder two minutes later did not seem to knock any more sense into Jones, so it was perhaps lucky for the Manchester United player that the clash to Smalling just before the interval knocked sense into Hodgson instead.
Of course, the tactical switch was not the complete answer to England’s problems. Having struggled for form at Old Trafford all season, Jones still has a bit to prove defensively as well.
But you don’t need to “know something about football” or have a “trained eye” to recognise that this particular England experiment is over.