TEAMtalk's Matty Briggs reflects on England's latest European Championship qualifying efforts and is glad to wave goodbye to the 4-4-2.
Capello: Penny has dropped!
If the Three Lions want to do themselves justice at a major tournament then the rigid 4-4-2 formation has got to be resigned to history. I think the penny has finally dropped with England coach Fabio Capello.
England's woeful efforts at last summer's World Cup showed up the deficiencies in the system and so far, in the current Euro qualifiers, Capello has abandoned the formation which has been the mainstay of English fooball down the years.
Whether it will force the footy magazine 'four-four-two' to change it's name remains to be seen, but hopefully England teams of the future will adopt a more fluid style.
It's not that I'm totally against playing with two central midfielders and two wingers, but I believe the higher the level of football, the less effective the system can be.
I can remember watching Bradford's promotion season of 1999 and the Bantams operated a 'tried and tested' 4-4-2. It was a system that earned the club promotion to the Premier League and it's a style of play that can still bring success lower down the league ladder and Bradford certainly fit into that bracket at the moment, but at the very top-level it's an antiquated way of playing. It's predictable and too easy to defend against.
Thankfully I think Capello has reached this conclusion too and with Wayne Rooney, Ashley Young, Theo Walcott, Adam Johnson, Stewart Downing, James Milner and Tom Cleverley available to him I think we've seen the end of the 4-4-2.
Friday's 3-0 victory over Bulgaria in Sofia fizzled out somewhat, but at times during the first half the quartet of Rooney, Young, Walcott and Downing showed some encouraging inter-play. Their movement was something we haven't seen from the Three Lions for sometime and with Jack Wilshere and Steven Gerrard to come back into the reckoning I genuinely believe we can get carried away once again.
It's a blueprint which Spain and Barcelona have been following for the last four or five years and it's certainly served them well. But you have to have the players good enough to fit into that system and England now have the personnel.
As long as the one or two players in the middle of the park are disciplined and provide a solid base to attack from then the chopping and changing of the front four or five is the way forward and it will certainly be the way the top teams like Spain, Holland and Germany approach the European Championships next summer.
