Eriksson left exposed by England's incoherence

Euro 2004 qualifying: Smith's dismissal sums up dismal night

The idea that Sven Goran Eriksson has carried England back into the front rank of international football has been under something of cloud for some time. Last night the heavens simply fell in.

Not on a football man caught in the distractions of some lurid, girly side-show. Not on the freakish ambush on a savage night in a ramshackled stadium in the wilds of Eastern Europe that was painted by his apologists after the desperate win over Slovakia in Bratislava last Saturday. No, this exposé was written all over an antiseptic English occasion, played out on a manicured field on an autumn evening that might have been described by the Met Office as mildly chilly.

But that was the weather report. The football account is of a deep freeze.

Frozen, just about utterly now, is the concept of a young England team equipped in talent and psychology to bounce back from the disturbing implications of their World Cup defeat by Brazil in Japan. The alibi then was that veteran goalkeeper David Seaman had fallen victim to the freakish free-kick of Ronaldinho, and that a great campaign had been sadly undermined. Reality re-asserted itself here when England scuffled and scrambled their way to a 2-2 draw with 90th-ranked Macedonia. The loss of two points is likely to prove critical in the European Championship qualifying duel with World Cup semi-finalists Turkey, but that is a reckoning for the future.

Last night, Seaman made another critical mistake when he allowed a corner kick from Macedonia's Artim Sakiri to sneak directly under his cross-bar. But this time there was no place to hide behind the crumpled figure of the big man with the pony-tail, who was almost certainly playing the last game of a superb international run that had turned steadily from glory to a crisis of nerve and judgement.

England's essential problem, which went so much more deeply than the injury to key player Steve Gerrard and the sickening late dismissal of Alan Smith, who had often been a rare point of drive and wit in this woebegotten England team, was not of fortune or individual failures of form and confidence. It was the lack of any sense of a coherent team. Eriksson claimed after the World Cup that his young team was bound to get better. Last night, that guarantee surely had to be withdrawn.

Is David Beckham, such a marginal figure in the World Cup, going to mature into a captain capable of more than brilliant free-kicks and photo opportunities? The evidence is not encouraging. His skill surfaced in the clever chip that brought the first of England's two equalisers against Macedonia. But the petulance that might easily have led to his dismissal in Bratislava returned quite dangerously. He was booked ­ and on several occasions seemed in danger of losing control.

Such an eventuality would have compounded the grimness of Eriksson's mood. Against Slovakia his first-half strategy had been cut to pieces and this week he had been talking about the value of the "diamond formation" that had brought a desperately scrambled victory.

In the end, he decided to play local hero Wayne Bridge wide on the left of midfield. It was another experiment that failed, another strand of evidence that, nearly two years into the job, Eriksson is making it up as he goes along.

Smith, having given considerable evidence of a reformed nature, lapsed into his old indiscipline at the end of the match, in which frustration and incoherence had taken an unshakeable grip on the English effort. It was a disaster of huge symbolism. At Villa Park last month, the young Leeds striker had emerged brilliantly from a rare Eriksson experiment­ a full 90-minute chance for a young player of great promise to make a serious claim for regular inclusion in the team. But it was another fleeting triumph. Smith, like so many recent caps, was given no chance to develop his impact. Last night, he played splendidly for a while before being sucked into a wider chaos, and when he was dismissed in the last moments of the game it seemed like some wider statement on the state of this team's development.

England never looked more than an ill-formed collection of varying talent. No one took a significant hold of events, and no one really seemed to know quite what they were doing. For Eriksson it was surely a night of unwelcome truth.

Before the game he said: "All systems can work if you have the right players." The brutal truth was plain enough. England didn't have a system, nor did they have the players. Such assets are not interchangeable. You have to have players who are clear about what they are doing. It is the function of a successful coach. England looked like a group of lost boys, and Eriksson should, for the moment, forget about systems. He needs to find his players and make sense of what they are doing. On this evidence, he doesn't have a lot of time.