Beckham walks alone through wall of silence

European Championship: England captain bravely tries to make atonement and win back nation's affection with statement stressing team's patriotism

Not since David Beckham rescued a place in the World Cup with a beautifully flighted free-kick at Old Trafford two years ago has he performed a greater service for English football than the one he delivered here yesterday.

He produced it nowhere near a football field. It was in the ballroom of a luxury hotel beside the Bosporus. He said that despite appearances which might be to the contrary, he wanted the nation to know that wearing the white shirt still meant something to him and his team-mates - well, quite a lot, as it happened.

On the eve of a game England must at least draw to ensure qualification for next year's European Championship finals in Portugal, he was the only representative of the national game who seemed to believe there were questions to answer and atonement to make after a week which had left his country shocked and repulsed by talk of strike action before the vital game with Turkey.

It wasn't - it has to be said - a masterpiece of logical thought and eloquent language. It stumbled and meandered into contradiction at times - and it never quite mustered that magically healing phrase "I'm sorry". It also, heaven knows, inevitably invited the cynical thought that someone in his army of advisers might just have told him that that his lucrative image rights, and those of the rest of English football, had recently been falling faster than shares on Black Monday.

But it was still true that on a day when the Football Association, perhaps still giddy from the fact that it had had the nerve to do the right thing and order the dropping of Rio Ferdinand after his failure to take a drug test, had laid down a ban on all questions other than those to do with basic football matters, Beckham alone walked through the wall of embarrassed - and embarrassing - silence.

"For 90 minutes," he said, "we can prove as players and a team how much wearing the England shirt does mean to us... We can prove that our passion is still there for our country and ourselves." More significantly, Beckham also read from a statement on behalf of himself and his team-mates which for the first time conceded that Ferdinand had done wrong in ignoring the test order - and that the matter had been passed back into the control of the FA.

Beckham, with touches of self-deprecating charm and some wry humour, turned his team away from the brinkmanship which had threatened an unprecedented refusal of labour by an England football team - and a stunning denouement to weeks of shockingly bad publicity for the game.

His statement set a mood of retreat from extreme positions from its first sentence. "Obviously, this has been a very difficult week for both the players and the FA," he read. "Now I would like to make a few things clear. There have been many discussions centred around the support of Rio Ferdinand and our concerns at the way the case was handled. Whilst we recognise Rio should not have missed his first test, we have gone on record to say that it was what happened afterwards that the squad was unhappy with. The issue is now a matter for the FA and they have promised to look at their procedures for future cases like this."

It was in all honesty a compromise position that might have been achieved after a few minutes of authority from an England football manager like Sir Alf Ramsey, who once placed the passports of such luminaries as Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton on their hotel pillows after they missed his curfew by a relatively fine margin.

But if we have learned anything about Sven Goran Eriksson this week, it is that whatever else he is, he is no Alf Ramsey. Nor is he a Beckham in yesterday's man-of-the-world form. Repeatedly, Eriksson was asked to review the week from his perspective, and each time he scuttled behind the FA directive for "just football questions, please". When it was suggested to an FA man that by ignoring all that gone before, everybody was being forced to live in a fantasy world, Eriksson did say: "I will answer that for myself. It is possible for a coach just to talk about football the day before a game." Repeatedly, he refused to confirm that he will see out his contract.

While Eriksson and the FA were inhabiting a planet named Unreality, Beckham, for all his plastic celebrity image and his careful PR grooming, seemed to be searching for something a little more reminiscent of flesh and blood. Perhaps tellingly, he refused to be drawn into his usual dogged advocacy of Eriksson as a permanent fixture as England coach. When asked if he thought the coach would still be around if things went wrong tonight, he said, quite curtly: "You should ask Mr Eriksson."

Consciously or not, Beckham also gave a withering account of Eriksson's role this week. Asked about the coach's position when strike talk was thick in the air, Beckham said: "He agreed that if we believed in what we were saying, he was with us, but I think he was with the FA as well." At this point, for one reason or another, Beckham rolled his eyes.

He agreed that the players' behaviour had led to a "wholesale slaughtering" by the media, but that it was within the team's power to win back the affection of the nation.

He suggested that a rumoured call for the head of the FA's new chief, Mark Palios, who, in his first months of office, has shocked the big guns Manchester United and Arsenal with the dropping of Ferdinand and the swift laying of charges against the six Highbury players who staged a sickening post-game demonstration against Ruud van Nistelrooy, was no longer a possibility. He added: "We desperately want to win not just because of what has gone on this week but because we want to qualify for the finals in Portugal next year. I think with what has been written and said about the player letting the country down, and if the fans really think that, then the only way we can put things right is by winning the game on Saturday.

"Personally, I'm very offended by questions about my patriotism, and I know the rest of the players are, but as I've been saying, the only way this can be put right is by the fans seeing that we still have passion - they will see it, I hope, on our faces and in our performance. It is the great thing about football. It can make people forget a lot of things going on around the world. Football is a great healer for a lot of people, and I hope that is what is going to happen on Saturday. That's what we have to do for the nation because it's been a hard week."

So if Beckham didn't quite quite say sorry, he came up with a non-insulting version of it in so many words. He said there had been too much grief, too many statements - "I don't want to see another statement," he said. He said it was time to play football and the nation, you had to believe, said Amen.