Sport: Have England's footballers gone soft?

Article published on Inquirelive.co.uk on 4th September 2012.
Have England's footballers gone soft?

Sunderland’s Adam Johnson is the latest England player to succumb to injury ahead of Friday’s World Cup qualifying fixture against Moldova. There are nine absentees from Roy Hodgson’s squad, and Johnson’s absence is the latest in a spate of recent injuries.

Wayne Rooney, set to return to England duty on a full-time basis after a cameo in Euro 2012, was sidelined with a frankly horrific cut sustained during Manchester United’s 3-2 win over Fulham on August 25th. His is the most high-profile of a long list of injuries to befall regular England players, and Scott Parker, Gareth Barry, Ashley Young, Phil Jones, Andy Carroll, Jack Wilshere and Ashley Cole all join him and Johnson on the physio’s table.

Some of these injuries are genuinely serious and the crocked players, like Rooney and Wilshere, are set to miss significant time. But the sheer volume of injuries – many of which players are due to be ‘fully recovered’ from in a matter of days - turns me towards the old debate over whether players prefer playing for their club or representing their country.

It’s an argument that can be traced back a few years to Liverpool and England defender Jamie Carragher’s assertion in his autobiography, published in 2008, that England players value their club over their country.

Carragher wrote: “Playing for Liverpool has been a full-time commitment. What followed with England was an extra honour, but not the be-all and end-all of my purpose in the game.”

It’s a stance that few have taken publically but it may still ring true to current players.

There are few people that expect England to struggle against Moldova on Friday, and Carragher’s comment may ring true to players only a matter of weeks into the start of a new Premier League season.

Fast-forward to recent times and discussion surrounding the commitment of international players has not gone away.

Prior to England’s friendly against Denmark in February of 2011 Geoff Hurst publically claimed, in an interview with The Telegraph, that: “Clubs have become more important than the national side...I find it astounding when players don’t turn up for England.”

It was a claim refuted by Chelsea’s Frank Lampard but re-iterated by former Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp. Prior to the Denmark game a number of high-profile England players such as Steven Gerrard and Rio Ferdinand were absent, and what transpired then has alarming parallels with the current state of the England squad.

What’s worse is that there is continual evidence of this happening at the highest level of football. Gareth Bale shakily admitted that he was too injured to partake in the Olympics for Stuart Pearce’s GB team, but appeared for Spurs in a pre-season fixture in Los Angeles just days later. Contrast this with Manchester City and Argentina’s Sergio Agüero, who risks the wrath of his club for attempting to force his way onto the Argentina squad in spite of a knee injury.

Whether they are legitimately injured or not, many of England’s players past and present can certainly be accused of taking ‘the Gareth Bale approach’ as opposed to ‘the Sergio Agüero approach’ that harkens back to the days of Geoff Hurst in which players would go above and beyond to appear for their country, if not for a sense of patriotic pride, but simply because it was, and still is, their job.