James Lawton: Eriksson pays high price for gamble on unfit Beckham

It is impossible to imagine that the captain is in shape to exert himself any more potently in Friday's match with the brilliant Argentinians

Amid the shock waves sent out by England's dismayingly inept opening World Cup performance one question nags most loudly of all. It concerns Sven Goran Eriksson's extraordinary, failed gamble on the fitness of his captain, David Beckham.

According to the England coach, Beckham was withdrawn from Sunday's horror show against Sweden not because he was injured but because he was tired to the point of exhaustion.

Beckham was, of course, always going to feel the effects of a strenuous engagement at the highest level of the game more than his team-mates. Seven weeks out of football, his famous marathon running feat against Greece in the final qualifying game was never a practical proposition. In the circumstances, his need to pace himself through the tone-setting opener was plainly compelling. But in the first minutes of the second half, when England entered a decline that could reasonably be described as vertiginous, Beckham was plainly a shot force.

Eriksson's wager on Beckham's capacity to return with significant influence at such a vital moment in the campaign had failed utterly. But the deeper question is how it could have happened in the first place. Ten days ago Eriksson's crack fitness coach, Ivan Carminati, drafted in from the coach's old club Lazio, was arrestingly candid about the odds facing the England captain. He said: "Maybe at the beginning of next week I can train with David. So you are thinking about him for the second game. I think with Beckham we have to cross the fingers." Eriksson promptly dismissed the gathering doubts, saying that he hadn't even "dreamed" of standing the player down from active service.

Here we have seen the result of such faith: a performance which was notable only for a couple of eye-catching passes and the corner-kick which delivered the ball to the head of Sol Campbell for England's goal. No Captain Courageous or Marvellous, no superhuman influence. Just an extremely talented footballer struggling to raise a gallop for half a match on which the whole of England's crusade here in the Far East might prove to have depended.

Eriksson faces many questions about his preparation for and organising of Sunday's performance. He will be asked to explain his tactics, which seem to be increasingly hinged to a reversion to the stone-age concept he was supposed to banish, long-ball football. He will be invited to throw a little light on England's intended purpose and why, whatever it was, it remained so relentlessly obscure. What also needs to be queried is the chance of a less celebrated footballer getting into a World Cup on Beckham's dubious terms.

Certainly there was much discomfort watching Beckham go through his repertoire of tricks for an adoring Japanese crowd, many of them wearing his branded shirt complete with captain's armband, before England's final warm-up game against Cameroon in Kobe eight days ago. You had to speculate about the commercial impact of Beckham's non-appearance in this 17th World Cup. He is huge in Asia. He is a cult figure, and it is a big, profitable cult. No one has yet suggested that Beckham's attendance here has been dictated by business considerations, however vast they plainly are – as some still do in the case of Ronaldo's ghost-like appearance in the last World Cup final in Paris. But at what point do the men who pay the piper such massive amounts begin to choose the music?

That parlous point may not yet have been reached, but how far can it be away? So far Beckham's delicate talent has – when you take away his corner kick – had no more impact on this World Cup than the laboured fluttering of an ailing butterfly's wing and it is impossible to imagine that he is in position to exert himself any more potently in Friday's match with the brilliant Argentinians.

So much of England's build-up, however, has been dominated by talk of Beckham, and at some psychological cost, you have to imagine, to the self-regard of some of his team-mates as they did the necessary hard work in preparing for football's ultimate challenge of a World Cup. When speculation mounted that Beckham might be sent home, Eriksson said: "If I have a guarantee that a player can't play against Sweden and can't play against Argentina and then probably Nigeria – if that is a fact, then I will have to make a decision."

The reality is that Beckham couldn't last for more than half a match against Sweden. He was palpably unable to go the full course required of a man who has become as much a talisman as a player.

It leaves England in a desperate void of leadership on the field, and of course they will never make enough profitable shirts to begin to justify such a possibility.

Far East arenas the opposite to rubble in north-west London

Everywhere you go in Japan and South Korea offers a stinging rebuke to our pathetically confused attempts to build one modern stadium to replace the sad, mouldering heap of discarded masonry known as Wembley, which, it is getting ever harder to appreciate, used to be the most famous venue for football in all the world.

Here, 20 dazzling new stadiums have been thrown up in a fraction of the time Wembley has been scheduled for re-newal. Gwengju, in south-west Korea, provides one of the more withering comparisons. A cultural stronghold, Gwengju is a city of 1.3million. It took three years to elegantly throw up its domed stadium and its lighting system which reflects the meaning of its name. Gwengju is the "village of light" and its work on this World Cup is particularly illuminating when we consider the appalling game of pass the parcel going on in Britain.

The Gwengju World Cup Stadium was completed bang on time last November. It took three years and a cost of $132m (£91m), or scarcely a sixth of the latest projection for a new Wembley. It has a seating capacity of 43,121, which is admitted to be beyond the needs of the city. But when the World Cup is over Gwengju stadium will serve as a multi-purpose sports centre for the city's young. It will house a fitness hall, ping-pong courts, taekwondo and judo gyms, badminton courts, an indoor golf range, a racquetball court and squash courts.

Meanwhile, the Wembley planners do relentless profitability sums. They debate the number of executive boxes that can be squeezed into the stadium design.

You see what is happening here and you feel like weeping, as you did at the Sydney Olympics two years ago, for the palsied state of British sport. South Korea have produced this dazzling backcloth for the World Cup just 14 years after staging a brilliantly produced Olympics. Meanwhile, we slip ever deeper into sport's Third World.

Okamura's tragedy tells a story

The most poignant story of this World Cup does not concern the injuries to big name players like Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham.

It belongs to the late Osamu Okamura, a member of the World Cup staff assigned to handle the logistical needs of the so-far sensational Senegal team. Okamura, worried that he would be unable to properly fulfil his duties and the loss of honour, to himself and his family, was simply too much. He killed himself.

There can be no softening of such a tragedy, but it does perhaps tells us something quite profound about some of the forces that have shaped the extraordinary passion which has plainly gone into this first Asian World Cup.

It may also explain why a British traveller using Japanese trains these last few days must feel that he has been lifted into another rather dreamy world of superb efficiency. Hopefully, few Japanese railway workers care quite as much as Osamu Okamura. But that they do to an extent beyond the imagination of a London commuter, for example, is evident the moment you take your clean and comfortable seat and rocket past the blur of Mount Fuji.