Whose shirt is it anyway?

Didn't it get on my nerves at the weekend?.. and many other people I should have thought? 'Which player owns the number one jersey?', 'who owns the leftback jersey?', 'What is the set starting eleven?' These kind of questions seemed to shape the pundits entire analysis on Saturday afternoon and it was irritating, not to mention wrong.



Anybody with a slightly technical footballing mind knows that there is a hell of a lot more to football than just selecting a rigid starting eleven, whose formation doesn't change and who sees out the full 90 minutes. Football is about:

• Flexibility (in terms of individual positioning).
• Changing the formation at half-time.
• Moving backwards and forwards from attacking play to defensive play.
• Substituting players, to change the shape of play and to catch the opposition out.

And yet, watching ITV's coverage on Saturday afternoon, the guys in the studio would not stop going on about; 'who is England's number one shirt' and 'we should know soon', 'Ashley Cole is our one and only leftback' and 'how come Fabio doesn't give Defoe the number 9 shirt?'

And this issue that the team needs to be set in stone is only a recent one. There is nothing wrong (to a logical football analyst's mind) with playing Jermaine Defoe as a super-sub, similar to the likes of Paul Scholes for Manchester United, and putting him on after half-time; evidence as shown that he seems to score in those circumstances. There is nothing wrong with changing the Goalkeeper, depending on his form, and playing the best keeper of the moment. And there is nothing wrong with playing different leftbacks, especially since Ashley Cole continuously makes mistakes and gets himself well out of position.

Let's all hope that Fabio Capello keeps doing his own thing and doesn't listen to the dilluded pundits of the moment.