Peter Corrigan: Time for trust – and a firmer grip on the game

Regardless of what happened in yesterday's international matches, the players deserved a much more considered and discursive approach to their labours than the hysterical reprise of the age-old club v country conflict that dominated the sports pages all week.

What made it worse was that most of those concerned, especially the media, got hold of the wrong end of whatever stick was lying around. Even the England manager, Sven Goran Eriksson, was at fault on Friday when he threatened to invoke the five-day rule in future and insist on players reporting to the England camp five days before a match whether or not they were injured.

Unfortunately, someone neglected to tell him that there is no longer a five-day rule when it comes to releasing players for international duty. The period for which clubs are obliged to supply players to play for their countries has been changed by Fifa to four days, including the day of the match – and that is only for qualifying matches. For friendlies, the reporting time is only 48 hours before the game.

Why Fifa have brought in a change that cuts down the access of national teams to their players is difficult to understand. They are supposed to be on the side of the national associations. But it means that the Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, was quite within his rights to play Paul Scholes against Middlesbrough on Tuesday night. He didn't have to release him until Thursday.

And while most people thought that Wales had granted United dispensation by allowing them to play Ryan Giggs on Tuesday night that, too, was permissible under the four-day rule. That doesn't explain why Ferguson played Scholes after informing England that the player was injured. That has to be interpreted as an outright snub, but the irritated Eriksson has since admitted that he now understands the situation.

Scholes was carrying an injury and was ruled out of the Middlesbrough game, but a late decision on Roy Keane caused a rethink. United felt it was a good idea to reduce Keane's ability to cause trouble by getting the hospital to anaesthetise him as soon as possible (and do his hip while they were at it). A call from Ferguson saying, "Sven, my old mate, I've got a bit of a problem and I'm going to have to play Scholes after all", would have saved a lot of bother. Eriksson says he would have done the same thing. "He wasn't fit but suddenly they were lacking players and they needed to win that game. Sometimes you take risks for players for three points, but if they are not fit they shouldn't play in friendlies," he said.

There were similar stories about Sir Bobby Robson's reluctance to free Craig Bellamy from Newcastle United to play for Wales in their Euro 2004 qualifier in Finland last night. But the most fervent Welshman would have to sympathise with Robson's concerns. Bellamy has been out of action for seven months with a knee injury for which Newcastle sent him to the United States for a £50,000 operation. His comeback has so far been limited to 53 minutes of reserve football plus a 27-minute appearance in the first team at Liverpool last Monday. Robson's anxiety that Wales should use him sparingly in Finland was far from outrageous.

Wales have had, without doubt, a rougher deal than any other country over the past century when it comes to being able to field their first-choice team. They were at top strength in Finland while England were scarcely undermanned at Villa Park. That doesn't sound like a crisis, does it? The entire kerfuffle makes you wonder what all these highly paid PR men are doing in football. The essence of successful public relations is good communication and the ability to avoid incoming problems. None of that was visible last week.

Of course, there are going to be problems in the run-up to every international match. There has never been more at stake for clubs or countries and they have to share players, so it is imperative that they build up a trust. It is not being too fanciful to suggest that if Eriksson was in charge of Manchester United – as, one day, he might be – and if Ferguson was managing England, which is a lesser possibility, more or less the same scenario would have been acted out last week.

There are far more pressing points of conflict, and last week provided further proof of the urgent need for the Football Association to get a firmer grip on English football at all its levels.

The FA chief executive, Adam Crozier, who wasn't contributing to the verbals last week because he was on holiday, is being targeted for criticism by Premier-ship clubs who want to run the game. They have accumulated power in recent years, but football will not flourish in England unless it is controlled from the centre. Tradition has always located that hub in the office of the FA secretary. Crozier has a more impressive title but has yet to acquire the gravitas of some of those who occupied the position before him.

One of the ambitions of the big clubs is to get a bigger cut of the FA's earnings from the international team and the FA Cup. After all, they maintain, they're paying fortunes to the players involved and deserve some financial recognition.

That may be worth debating, but the threat that is said to accompany the demand is that they will boycott the FA Cup. It has long been apparent that they dislike the prospect of being turned over on some lower-league ground in the murk of early January, but Crozier must defend that essential part of our football heritage.

His is not an easy job, but he must succeed on behalf of all those who care about the game and its traditions. What we need is a Runnymede in reverse, with the Premiership barons being forced to sign a Magna Carta for the greater good of the game. Football must move forward with clearer objectives to suit all. The game deserves far sexier and more positive stories dominating the sports pages than there were last week.

Rennie's yellow card

For some extraordinary reason, the referee Uriah Rennie is reported to be facing a reprimand for manhandling Roy Keane in the first of the player's notorious clashes with his former Republic of Ireland colleague Jason McAteer at Sunderland last weekend.

For those who have only seen the replays fewer than a dozen times, Rennie stepped in to restrain Keane after the running maul looked like ending in fisticuffs. It seems that the Professional Match Officials Games Board are to review the incident and are likely to judge that he was wrong to make physical contract with Keane.

The fact that Rennie, a martial arts expert, stopped a full-scale scrap developing and handled the whole situation perfectly is, apparently, not the point. I take it that when a fight breaks out in future the referee is to stand by until one of the players gets knocked out – and then send off the winner. If there isn't a knockout, he will award the red card on points.