Respectable, fairly honest and capable of the odd mildly eccentric moment, Roy on Match Of The Day was the personification of the England team. He fielded gentle questions well enough, if uninspiringly. He was encouraging about the players without talking them up to unreasonable levels. He wore – a strange, misguided choice to mirror his persistence with Wayne Rooney – an elaborately overdesigned Louis Vuitton belt that would have looked ideal on a Milanese gigolo. Roy is not, nor has he ever been, such a thing, even when manager of Internazionale. Like the gaffer’s swanky buckle, England do maintain the odd bit of flair, the capacity to surprise. It just tends to be very well hidden beneath flab and polyester.
Wor Sir Alan Shearer “turned provider”, in footballese, actually asked a pre-prepared question rather than just dishing out his opinions like a grudging carvery chef. The question went on for ages and seemed to confuse Roy, although not as much as it confused Al, who only managed to make his way through all of it by drawing on the iron will that once served him so well as a brutaliser of centre-halves.
What emerged was Roy saying that the “situation with the forward players is as strong as it has been” in his tenure, while Jamie Vardy and Harry Kane have been “a sensation”. Roy took questions about each area of the team in turn and declared himself more than satisfied with the talent pool in defence, goal and midfield. There was a suggestion of a possible Gerrard-Lampard echo boom with the insistence that “there’s no reason why Ross Barkley and Dele Alli cannot play together” but the manager was generally cagey, bordering on the political.
His firmest statement was that “Rooney is an important player, our captain and a player we need to depend upon for the Euros”, so it would seem that we’re stuck with that particular lumbering talisman-millstone, but Hogdson proved too wily to get locked into a story as to which individuals would be bowing out with their heads held high against Portugal in a Toulouse quarter-final.
Gary Lineker signed off with: “This bonkers season continues, the way it is going, England will go and win the Euros.”
“Hope so,” Roy said, mildly.
A nation shrugged.
- Telegraph