No tired excuses

LIONS in the winter, lambs in the summer. Michel Platini’s summation of England’s players at tournaments is often advanced as the reason for failure. We play too much football, we don’t have a break, we’re exhausted. Yet the CIES Football Observatory, based in Switzerland, places England fourth in a table of time played by each World Cup squad. In total, England’s players have been on the field for 76,476 minutes this season. That is roughly 10,000 minutes less than Spain, 5,000 behind France and 4,000 behind Brazil. Exhaustion has always seemed an over-simplification, when we witness Premier League players from other countries performing without noticeable fatigue far deeper into the competition. The squad picked by Roy Hodgson in 2014 went out at the group stage, yet had played 4,000 minutes less than the German 23 who won the tournament. Mesut Ozil of Arsenal started the final, while Andre Schurrle, then with Chelsea, and another Arsenal player, Per Mertesacker, came on as substitutes. Maybe the constant focus on English weariness works like those signs on motorways, warning to take a break if tired. The moment you see one, you yawn. ALSO from the CIES Football Observatory, a squad-by-squad breakdown of how many World Cup players are with clubs abroad. England are one of only two countries whose 23 play solely in domestic leagues — Saudi Arabia being the other — while Croatia, Sweden and Iceland have 100 per cent of their players in exile. I have no idea whether this is significant; it’s just interesting. AS UNAI EMERY begins shaping his Arsenal squad for next season, one of his biggest decisions is over the captaincy. By rights, it should go to Laurent Koscielny, who has deputised on many occasions in recent years. Yet Koscielny is out with an achilles injury until December at least and Arsenal as a team have been desperately short of leadership. Without doubt this was due to Arsene Wenger’s marginalisation of the captain’s role. The previous two incumbents, Per Mertesacker and Mikel Arteta, had suffered longterm injuries, and as a result the armband was passed around. Between 1987 and 2005, Arsenal had two captains, Tony Adams and Patrick Vieira, and it is no surprise the team bristled with stronger purpose back then. If Emery is to rebuild Arsenal in that image, he needs to identify a leader, not offer another sop to a stricken player.