Premier League to blame for poor World Cup?

Jul 10 2010 by Stuart Rayner, The Journal

IT should be the greatest football show on earth but the A-listers have not risen to the occasion. Stuart Rayner asks how much the Premier League is to blame.

IT is meant to be a showcase for the world’s best footballers, but at times this year’s World Cup has left you wondering if anyone had told them.

Every tournament throws up undiscovered gems who all but the most anoraky of fans knew little of before kick-off. Mention Mesut Özil, Asamoah Gyan, Keisuke Honda, Fabio Coentrão and Robert Vittek a month ago and you would be met with a wall of blank faces, now they bring memories of goals or barnstorming performances.

But World Cups are also supposed to be the time when some of the planet’s best footballers confirm their greatness. One or two – Barcelona’s new signing David Villa and their talisman Lionel Messi – have enhanced their reputations but most have sullied them. Questions are starting to be asked as to whether Wayne Rooney – two World Cups, no goals – really is the “world-class” talent we thought. Fernando Torres, Didier Drogba and Robin van Persie have looked a shadow of themselves.

All four ply their trade in the Premier League. The tournament’s two most disappointing teams were England and France – picked from the squads with the most Premier League players. Ivory Coast were expected to carry African hopes if they could escape a tough group but did not.

Theirs was the third-biggest English-based contingent. Coincidence? Probably not.

The World Cup is in danger of losing its lustre. If it does, the Premier League must take its share of the blame.

Team England and its physios can say otherwise until they are blue in the face but physically Rooney was not the player who took the top-flight by storm until injury in March. Van Persie, Torres, Drogba, Nicklas Bendtner and Gareth Barry all looked like they had returned too early, while Germany’s Michael Ballack missed the tournament with ankle ligament damage.

There is no direct link between playing too often and being clattered by Kevin-Prince Boateng in an FA Cup final – but those in the know insist tired bodies are more susceptible to injury.

Of more concern to the Football Association should be the performance of an England squad staffed entirely by Premier League players. From egos to tactics, there were plenty of reasons why the Three Lions were little more than pussycats in South Africa.

But perhaps the most significant was the one Fabio Capello pointed straight to in the post-mortems when declaring in his broken English his players were “tie-red”.