HODGSON’S AT
Young guns primed after virus strikes England team
BETWEEN foreign bodies and foreign players, the job of managing England appeared to be getting a whole lot harder last night. Roy Hodgson yesterday found himself preparing for his first competitive game at Wembley amid fears that a virus is spreading through his squad.
Theo Walcott was sent home, while Daniel Sturridge was put in quarantine at the team hotel in the hope of preventing England suffering any further casualties ahead of this evening’s World Cup qualifier against Ukraine.
Walcott’s absence means Hodgson has lost 12 players through either injury or illness and yesterday he had to call up two new players — Liverpool’s 17-year-old Raheem Sterling and Southampton’s Adam Lallana — as well as Tottenham’s Jake Livermore.
Hodgson did so in the knowledge that the possible loss of Sturridge would leave him with only four outfield substitutes for tonight’s game, with those four expected to be Kyle Walker, Danny Welbeck, Michael Carrick and Gary Cahill. In training yesterday Hodgson partnered Phil Jagielka with Joleon Lescott, which points to Jagielka replacing the injured John Terry alongside his former Everton team-mate.
Hodgson insisted that the young recruits were unlikely to be involved this evening. Their call-up certainly came too late for them to train with the squad yesterday.
But the numbers are dwindling at an alarming rate and Hodgson only hopes the situation does not get any worse.
‘Theo Walcott trained fully yesterday and was as fit as a fiddle,’ said Hodgson, ‘but then he was violently sick this morning and had to be sent home. So we’ve brought in three players who interest us for the future. That’ll be a contingency plan and we’ll fill our quota on the bench. That’s the thinking.
‘Daniel Sturridge is still being monitored. We think he is going to be OK. He trained yesterday with these stomach cramps and complained of them but he still got through training.
‘Today he woke up with the same stomach cramps, although he was slightly better, and the doctor advised us to keep him out of training and to see how things are when he wakes up tomorrow.’
Asked if there were fears the bug could spread, Hodgson said: ‘Well we hope not and that is one of the reasons we were quite anxious to get Theo back home as soon as possible and we’ve kept Daniel away from the other players both last night and today.
‘We’ve called up some extra players just in case, because I suppose you never know. You could wake up tomorrow morning and one or two are suffering from this virus but we hope not. We hope it is just an isolated case with the two players.’
The outbreak of the virus nevertheless forced Hodgson to raid the FA creche as well as the bottom of the Barclays Premier League.
This should probably be seen as a positive at the start of a World Cup campaign. England’s performance against Italy at the European Championship demanded radical change and the sudden influx of so many fresh faces created a welcome sense of revolution at the team hotel. But with it there also came a sense of desperation.
It is not all bad. In Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Tom Cleverley, Hodgson has certainly discovered two players capable of cementing themselves in the national team come the next World Cup in Brazil.
They have the quality to adapt to the more continental style required to succeed at major tournaments.
In Sterling, too, Hodgson clearly sees something exciting. To be fair it has been hard to miss if you have seen Liverpool this season.
But Sterling’s call-up looks like a move Hodgson had no intention of making this soon when the 17-yearold has made only eight first team appearances for his club and was considered more suited to England’s Under 19s than the Under 21s when the squads were originally selected.
At the team hotel yesterday Hodgson was asked if the selection of Sterling and a midfielder from Southampton pointed to a dearth of decent English players in the increasingly cosmopolitan Premier League.
One look at the most recent round of Premier League football highlights the problem. Of the 220 players who started for the 20 Premier League teams, only 69 were available to England.
That is 31.4 per cent and compared to the leading European leagues it does not make comfortable reading. In Spain’s La Liga 64.3 per cent of players were Spanish. France boasted 62.7 per cent, Italy 52.1 per cent and Germany 45 per cent.
But England skipper Steven Gerrard pointed out: ‘If Wayne Rooney, Jack Wilshere and Andy Carroll were fit they would all be in the squad. When everyone’s fit and available, we’ll be fine.’
But injuries are a frequent occurrence — Wilshere has been sidelined for more than a year — and Hodgson must be concerned any ambitions he might have could be limited by the sheer number of foreign players in the top flight.
‘Would I prefer to have a reverse of those statistics, with 66 per cent of the players being English? Of course I would,’ said the England manager. ‘But that’s not going to happen. The Premier League is a fantastic league, but it’s a league that embraces all the top European players and we have to accept that.
‘There’ll be occasions when I select people and you say, “They’re only reserves at United, Arsenal, Liverpool or Chelsea”. But I may think they’re worthy of a place.
‘I’d like to think they’re there because they have the talent to be there, even if the numbers of games they can boast is relatively small. But there are more than 10 players — six of whom would have been originally selected — who aren’t here.
‘But those we invited to Italy and others have created a good impression on myself, my staff, and the senior players. They recognise these guys can play football.’