James Lawton: Eriksson now has the chance to overcome his own weakness

It is a terrible indictment of the work of the England coach, Sven Goran Eriksson, that Emile Heskey is emboldened enough to push his claims for a return to England's front line alongside Michael Owen for next week's European Championship qualifier in Slovakia.

It is what happens when somebody operates in a culture of chance rather than carefully achieved certainties. Sir Alf Ramsey's response to Heskey's advertisement for himself would have been a withering glare.

The Liverpool's man presumption could only be taken seriously against the background of mystery surrounding the pattern of Eriksson's England. In truth, there is no pattern. The national team is governed not by conviction but fad.

Heskey, after a good performance against a derelict Spartak Moscow – could this really have been the club the great Stan Cullis, of Wolves, was so proud to beat back in the 1950s? – should be politely told to mind his place. But then that might be seen as a little hard on Heskey. His place – if indeed he legitimately has one on the international stage – has not exactly been made clear. But then what has?

Three months after the World Cup Eriksson's plans remain as much a puzzle as they were before the great tournament. Kieron Dyer also believes he has a claim to a place up front. He likes the idea of having a go. Why not? If Eriksson has a policy it seems to resemble most the old navigation technique of the United States Air Force. Once an RAF navigator, trained to travel by the stars, hitched a ride in a Super Fortress. He visited his American counterpart and was surprised to discover him reading an action comic. "Where," asked the RAF man, "are the charts?" He was told: "Don't worry, buddy, we'll hit a radio beam any time now."

Eriksson has been flying the best part of two years now and the beam is proving elusive. One might just have been detected in an otherwise meaningless exercise against Portugal at Villa Park last month. There Alan Smith had two extraordinary achievements. One was a debut of arresting confidence and accomplished work. The other was that he lasted a full 90 minutes in a friendly supervised by Eriksson.

This was staggering in that Eriksson appeared to be taking the chance to look at a young player in new conditions for the length of a whole game. Eriksson has recently stated that he will abandon his absurd practice of turning all non-competitive international games into a series of cameo walk-ons. But does that mean a logical progression to real team-building, to the kind of classic assembling of players and the systematic elimination of their doubts, and mistakes, that has marked the all the success stories of the international game and was such a fundamental aspect of Ramsey's success?

At this point Eriksson's team should, barring injuries and suspensions, more or less pick itself in the wake of a World Cup in which its youth was continually stressed by the coach.

Given the impressive arrival of Smith the team should read: Seaman; Gary Neville, Ferdinand, Campbell, A Cole/Bridge; Beckham, Gerrard, Scholes, Sinclair/J Cole; Smith, Owen. The idea of pushing Ashley Cole, who has been in such a confident mood for Arsenal, to the left side of midfield is persuasively argued by Ramsey's right-back George Cohen. "He has acquired some of the attributes of a proper defender," says Cohen, "but far from all of them. He still takes up some alarming positions, but there is no doubt that on the ball he can be a force. He's quick and he can get some crosses in. That surely makes him a strong candidate for the left, which is the big problem position and where Heskey is plainly unsuitable. Bridge seems to be a much sounder defender than Cole."

When David Seaman makes a mistake these days he tends to err on the side of the catastrophic, but it still hard to know who you would trust more at the dawn of a new qualifying campaign. Long-term, Paul Robinson of Leeds looks the pick by some distance, but plainly he needs some more experience. If Eriksson opts to keep Cole at left-back, surely Trevor Sinclair has the strongest claim along the left. He played well in England's best performance of the World Cup against Argentina, when he came on after the injury to Owen Hargreaves, and has the huge advantage of being used to the position. But with West Ham having struggled so badly, Sinclair appears to have slipped from sight. If there was any consistency of selection, he would surely be the choice.

Ah, consistency. The bedrock of any team's improvement still seems an unattainable goal for Eriksson's England. After the erratic reigns of Glenn Hoddle and Kevin Keegan, the Swede brought calm and a degree of common sense. For some critics, including this one, the combination proved a little too intoxicating. For common sense we also read a hard professional feel for the realities of big-time football, a capacity to inflict both a way of playing and thinking which had been so alarmingly absent before. That this was an illusion was only too clear in the course of the World Cup. England veered from the good to the rank bad, and in the defeat by Brazil – when, as it turned out, only Turkey and Germany, beaten 5-1 in Munich just 10 months earlier, stood in the way of total success – we saw a team utterly lacking in adequate guidance. Eriksson was paralysed beyond the uttering of a few platitudes after Seaman's gaffe and Brazil's reduction to 10 men.

Slovakia represents a new start and the hope must be that Eriksson will come to it with some recognition of the weaknesses of thought and action revealed in the final débâcle in Japan. He should pick Smith, a young player of competitive character and good talent, who took his chance extremely well.

It would be a hint – previously elusive – that indeed there might just be the beginnings of a pattern. Of one performance leading to another, of rhythm developing, of a team being built rather than plucked from the air – and the latest headlines.