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Date: Sun Jun 14 05:01:33 GMT+00:00 1998
Mail: barry@www.red11.org


This Issue:
1. Foe To Join (D.Mail)
2. Times Article on Scholes

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Date:         Sun, 14 Jun 1998 10:44:30 +0800
Reply-To: Red Devil Marcus 
Sender: "Manchester United Football Club (soccer)"
              
From: Red Devil Marcus 
Subject:    Foe To Join (D.Mail)

United switch goes ahead - Foe

Saturday, June 13, 1998

Cameroon midfielder Marc-Vivien Foe claims that he needs only to pass a
medical to complete a £4million move to Manchester United.

United director Maurice Watkins insisted earlier this week that the
23-year-old's switch from French champions Lens to Old Trafford was off
after he broke his left leg last month.

But Foe revealed that he had been told by United manager Alex Ferguson that
the move would go ahead if he passes a medical in two weeks' time.

'Alex rang me to reassure me that whatever happens, nothing will change his
mind on the subject,' Foe said.

X-rays have shown that the Lens star's injury is healing well. He is due to
have the plaster removed on June 23 and begin training three weeks after
that.


   Marcus Lionel van Geyzel.

   "I can only please one person per day.
    Today is not your day.
    Tomorrow isn't looking very good either". -- Dogbert




X-Sender: sfisher@pinc.com (Unverified)
Date:         Sat, 13 Jun 1998 20:20:13 -0700
Reply-To: "Manchester United Football Club (soccer)"
              
Sender: "Manchester United Football Club (soccer)"
              
From: Steve Fisher 
Subject:  Times Article on Scholes
To: MUFC@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU

 Glenn Hoddle must identify his creative force
  and make him part of the spine of the team

    Scholes best man for the job of driving
                 midfield on



IT IS TIME for trust. Glenn Hoddle should
choose the man he thinks is best-equipped to
do the linking job in England's midfield and
then give that player a run of matches to
establish himself. No position in the team is
more important.

The World Cup challenge cannot succeed unless
somebody emerges to take on the creative
responsibilities that would have been handled
by Paul Gascoigne if his abysmal lack of
condition had not made his selection
unjustifiable.

I suspect Hoddle believes, as I do, that Paul
Scholes is the one most likely to fill the
role effectively. If that is the case, he
should put the lad in and then stick by him,
even if he is not brilliantly successful from
the start.

The chosen player should be given a chance to
become part of what the coach calls the spine
of his team. He must be allowed to integrate
with those other key players, to develop a
comfortable understanding with them, so that
the influence he exerts can steadily grow as
the tournament progresses. Hoddle obviously
regards David Seaman, Tony Adams, Paul Ince,
David Batty and Alan Shearer as core members
of his team, men he wouldn't dream of
replacing unless injury or suspension forced
him to make changes. He has had enough time,
and done enough experimenting, to be clear
about his idea of the best link-man
available. Further chopping and changing
won't help now. He has to trust his judgment
and trust the man he picks, and think in
terms of asking him to do the job throughout
the World Cup.

I have no fears about Scholes's temperament
or his ability to cope with that
responsibility. There might be a little
concern about the physical strain of having
to pump up and down the field, from box to
box, for 90 minutes. He has done miraculously
well in shrugging off the problems of his
asthmatic condition but sometimes when I felt
the demands made on him in Manchester United
games might be unreasonable I told him to sit
in a holding position for a spell and let one
of the other midfielders make the forward
runs.

Ince would certainly relish alternating with
him in that way now and again. Ince's best
qualities have always been defensive - he is
as good a tackler as any midfielder you'll
see - but nobody will ever reduce his
confidence in his attacking range. Of course,
he is not as young as he was and when he goes
into advanced areas he will have to make sure
he has the legs to get him back.

It is hard to overstate how vital the
contribution of someone like Scholes could
be. Those other men Hoddle sees as the spine
of the team are, with the exception of
Shearer, the kind of players you depend on to
frustrate the opposition. They can prevent
you from losing but they cannot be expected
to win matches for you.

Shearer can, but he is a specialist finisher,
not a creator for others. His great
advantages show in the box or just on the
edge of it. The power of his shooting is
frightening and, as I've said before, his
ratio of strikes on target is phenomenal.
Given the right service, he is as damaging as
any striker in the game. So there can be no
complaint if he doesn't manufacture a lot on
his own, other than through his strength when
one-on-one with a defender. He shouldn't be
expected to slice open defences with passes
of vision. Players further back should be
doing that.

Teddy Sheringham is capable of producing
those balls when he gets into the hole behind
the striking positions. He needs people to do
the running for him but he sees the game well
and delivers the ball to hurtful places. He
can also score, and is especially useful in
the air, and all of that tells me that Hoddle
will start with him rather than Michael Owen.

We all marvel at how exceptional the
Liverpool boy is, and his pace and
goalscoring record suggest that he must have
an impact on this World Cup, but England are
so noticeably short of penetrative passers
that the case for Sheringham is strong.
Scotland, in their heroic effort against
Brazil, showed that if you are organised and
determined you can worry the most fancied
opponents. If Seaman plays to form, Adams
applies his talent for leadership and
organisation and Batty and Ince secure the
midfield, England will undoubtedly be hard to
beat. But who is going to win games for them?
Shearer cannot do it on his own and they
don't have wing-backs as electric as, say,
Roberto Carlos. Somehow they must find the
penetration Scotland lacked.

That brings us back to the link-man and back,
in my mind, to Scholes. He could be presented
with the challenge and the opportunity of a
lifetime. In spite of his youth, he would be
well prepared. All the way through our
Manchester United system, from schoolboy
level, he was outstanding. When I say that,
I'm not just thinking of his gifts as a
footballer - the excellent control that keeps
the ball close to his body all the time, his
alertness to every movement around him, the
vision and technical quality of his passing -
but also of his attitude.

He is a competitor, a winner, a lad whose
heart will never let his skills down. The
fact that he is small never makes him shy
away from danger and his bravery has helped
him to exploit the natural goalscoring touch
he has with either his head or his feet.

Like Hoddle, I have always tried to have a
core of reliables running through my teams
and I decided quite early that Scholes would
qualify. But for England to get the best out
of him, Hoddle will have to let him settle
into the job in central midfield. There has
been some surprise over the series of totally
different teams the coach fielded in the
warm-up matches. It is a fact that most of
the countries that do well in the World Cup
have a fair degree of consistency in their
selections immediately before and certainly
during the tournament. Hoddle's experiments
indicated that he did not have an ideal
line-up in his head and was giving the fringe
contenders every chance to force themselves
in.

I have heard the suspicion that with
Gascoigne he was giving the player enough
opportunities to prove conclusively that he
wasn't fit to come to France. But I don't
believe there was anything as devious
involved. In that kind of situation, the
theory about giving somebody enough rope to
hang himself can come unstuck if he scores a
hat-trick and hangs you. Maybe there wasn't
much risk of that, given Gascoigne's physical
state, but I am convinced Hoddle simply
delayed the exclusion until the evidence left
him with no option.

Several other questions have outlasted the
Gascoigne issue, including the one created by
trying Darren Anderton as a wing-back, which
hinted that Hoddle was wondering about using
David Beckham in central midfield. The result
is that England have come into the finals
with much more speculation surrounding their
formation than you usually find with the
nations that dominate World Cups. For the
serious business now beginning, they will
definitely want a settled team. A sense of
familiarity among the players, of being able
to depend on one another, counts for a lot,
whether they are operating at club or
international level.

During my first couple of days on the
training ground with Manchester United nearly
a dozen years ago I decided I wanted two
centre-backs who could play together every
week. Paul McGrath, apart from his personal
problems, was plagued by injuries. I got Gary
Pallister and Steve Bruce and over the next
five years they provided the foundation of
our success.

They were, if you like, the base of the
spine. Pallister and Bruce were two men
functioning as one unit. They could read each
other down to the last detail. If one had a
bad spell, the other pulled out a bit extra
to compensate. It is difficult to achieve
that sort of understanding in national teams,
unless you have club partnerships, but you
try to go as close as you can. Certainly when
it comes to that key linking role in midfield
you want to give the player the best possible
chance to develop an understanding with
everybody around him. I think Scholes should
be the man and I think Hoddle should make him
a fixture for the duration of England's World
Cup.

Surely it is out of the question that events
in Marseilles tomorrow will put their
involvement at risk. The tournament draw has
done them a huge favour by giving them
Tunisia as their first opponents. An emphatic
win is well within their capabilities and it
would put psychological pressure on Romania
and Colombia when they meet later in the day.
For Hoddle's squad of World Cup novices, a
defeat could have a catastrophic effect on
morale and leave them facing the nightmare of
a premature return home. But I don't think we
should waste time worrying about that.

Our anxieties should be concentrated on
Scotland, who are anchored at the bottom of
their group and look odds-against to reach
the second round for the first time in their
history. Perhaps I'm a Glasgow optimist but I
still have faith that they can survive. They
deserve no less after representing us so
magnificently in Paris on Wednesday. There
may have been an omen in the way I escaped
from a deadly predicament on the day of the
match. Three hours before kick-off there was
still no sign of 14 tickets I had promised to
relatives and friends from Glasgow, Aberdeen
and America. As I began to imagine how it
would feel to be strung up outside the Stade
de France, the cavalry arrived at the last
gasp. Colin Hendry has the same hair-colour
as Custer, but he might get a different
result.

* Alex Ferguson was talking to Hugh McIlvanney



             
 
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