Man Utd behaving badly

Actions benefited new Barcelona boss Laporta

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By Brian Glanville, World Soccer

WELL, the Barcelona bubble burst and left Real Madrid as the only contender for David Beckham's signature.

You must though hand it to the 40-year-old Catalan lawyer Joan Laporta for so cleverly using Beckham as the means towards gaining the Barcelona presidency, and by an overwhelming margin of votes. Mug punters must clearly abound there, and you wonder how they felt once Laporta backed off and protested that Beckham was just one more element in his electoral program.

Certainly both he and Manchester United behaved deplorably in almost openly negotiating over Beckham (a) without talking to him (b) and still more deplorably, doing so when Laporta had no official position.

Will Beckham flourish at Real Madrid? Cynics might say that Real are not really worried about that, since whether or not he succeeds, they would have a large enough share of his image rights, especially in the Far East, to make a profit whatever happens.

Jorge Valdano, once a World Cup winner with Argentina and now the general manager of the club, has said he would want Beckham to play not on the right wing but in a central midfield position. This will doubtless allay the anxieties of the far more talented Luis Figo, who could thus stay on the right flank, though Guti, locally born and bred, now playing midfield rather than up front, has already expressed his alarm. While the young keeper Iker Casillas has openly declared, "Beckham is more about marketing than playing."

I've never really been convinced by Beckham the midfielder, though it seems this is where he would be prepared to play. His undoubted gifts, his right-footed dead ball kicks, shots and crosses, can up to a point flourish on the flank, where his lack of pace and ball skills can be compensated.

Might Manchester United come to rue the day they let him go? It's feasible.

IT was astonishing, the day after England's truly wretched first-half performance at Middlesbrough against Slovakia, to see how kind some correspondents had been, how gently they treated Sven-Goran Eriksson, praising him for his tactical nous. Eh?

The fact is that he got things dismally wrong and was so lucky to get away with it. Quite apart from the fiasco of a goal that Slovakia scored for their free kick, for which central defense and goalkeeper all had to take the blame, there were at least three other occasions when Slovakia failed to exploit what amounted to an open goal.

In the mere basics of defense, England failed wretchedly. It was all too clear that neither full back, Danny Mills or Ashley Cole, knows how to defend at international level, that Gareth Southgate is past his meridian, that Matthew Upson is a competent club player but no more.

It still astonished me that Eriksson so perversely keeps Gareth Barry off the pitch when the lack of a competent left-sided player, either as full back or wing back, becomes clearer in every game. This, we are told, has forced Eriksson to use the much trumpeted but now seriously exposed diamond formation, which entails pushing right footed midfielders out on to the left flank.

Wayne Rooney? One poor half a game is surely insufficient to condemn him. His talents are beyond belief and they must continue to be nurtured. And surely there has to a place in midfield for Joe Cole, whose shooting was a feature of the second half of that largely meaningless friendly against Serbia.

IN what looks suspiciously like a damage-limitation exercise, the Turks and their manager have been railing against a plainly innocent Football Association, accusing them or trying to whip up condemnation within UEFA so that next October's vital Turkey-England match will be played behind closed doors. It should be; or better still, it ought to be played at a neutral venue.

Pots and kettles perhaps, but I submit that for all the rioting outside the Stadium of Light when Turkey played there, the two pitch invasions, the racist chanting -- which could indeed logically have led to a closed-doors game for England -- all this was nothing to what happened at the Besiktas ground.

Were it an Italian game, in which missiles were thrown and a visiting player was knocked out by one of them, it would have been awarded 2-0 a tavola, on the table, to the offended side; and so it should have been. Not only did the Turkish fans at Besiktas stadium act barbarically, but they were whipped up and incited by the official announcer, over the loudspeakers.

HOW could an England Under-20 team lose 8-0 in Toulon to an Argentina side that proceeded to be beaten 3-0 by Portugal, which had defeated England by the same score? Manager Les Reed, of whom I know not, lamented the loss of 20 possible players. Are our youngsters really so inept? And isn't there such a thing as tactics?

Brian Glanville is Britain's most celebrated football writer. He also writes a monthly column in World Soccer magazine.

His latest book, a fully updated edition of THE STORY OF THE WORLD CUP is available in all good bookshops. Readers of worldsoccer.com can buy this highly-acclaimed history of the World Cup and enjoy a 10% discount by clicking here.