No more being stuck in the hotel... treat Lions stars like adults and watch them go!
IT WAS an experience that still haunts me. If I have dreams of my time with England at Euro 2000 then I’m likely to wake up in a cold sweat thinking I’m trapped in a forest.
Ok, I’m exaggerating. I have three daughters (and a son) so it’s not trees that make me wake up in a cold sweat. But you get the point.
I can still remember the hotel we stayed in. It was in the middle of a forest in the Ardennes in Belgium, and it was a nightmare. There was nothing to do, nowhere we could go, and we couldn’t even get a phone reception.
Stuff a bunch of young men in a claustrophobic space like that for a few weeks, and ask them to sit in their rooms all day without even their phones, and you’ll see team spirit fall apart. I’ve heard all the arguments. Professionals. Concentrate on the job. Not a holiday. But how many times have England made that mistake of pandering to the perception of how the team should behave, and then sticking them into a glorified prison compound for weeks on end?
You’re cooped up in a room, your mind gets duller and duller, and you long to be anywhere else. It’s no surprise that transmits into the performances out on the pitch. How can you get the best out of unstimulated, resentful footballers?
It was virtually the same in 2002 when we went to Japan for the World Cup. My memory of that time is hazy because I’ve tried to blank it out, but it seemed like we went there weeks before the tournament for a camp... and ended up staying about a year!
It got a bit better through the years, they started putting stuff in the hotels like arcades and film equipment. And no doubt now there’s some state-ofthe-art digital stuff.
But for me, it’s about treating the squad as adults. The only time I can remember that being the case was Euro ’96.
The atmosphere was great, because Terry Venables let us take ownership of how we behaved. I know everyone will cry ‘dentist chair’ but it’s no coincidence we had our best tournament since the World Cup in 1966, because the players felt together.
Gareth Southgate was very much part of it, and I believe he will have learned from that.
We should have won Euro ’96, because Terry knew how to deal with us. In fact, had he made a substitution in the semi-final I reckon we would have done.
We had me and Les Ferdinand on the bench who could both take penalties. And, on top of that, I was brought on in the quarter-final to take the fifth penalty, so why not again?
But back to Southgate. He saw how we got the best out of Paul Gascoigne. I wouldn’t say we baby sat him, but we took it in turns to keep him occupied. We used to have shifts!
The hotel was just our squad too, no other guests, so we could relax and be ourselves.
In 2002, I never really got on with Sven-Goran Eriksson. He didn’t let the players do anything.
And I think he made a massive mistake in the quarter-final against Brazil.
Michael Owen wasn’t fit, but he went with him anyway. I was on the bench, but when Sven finally made the change, probably too late, he didn’t put me on.
My experience of tournaments is a few what ifs – and lot of stir-crazy boredom. At least Southgate knows what it’s like and can do something different.