WHEN a manager is under pressure he quite often reverts to meaningless platitudes designed to try to paper over the fact he hasn’t the first idea of what to do to get himself out of the mess he has created.

Steve McClaren differed to this approach in that he started his reign as England manager with hackneyed phrases and continued from there. On being given the job he crow-barred in as many uses of the word “passion” as is humanly possible in a single press conference, said he wanted to build a team “the fans can be proud of”, and even ventured into “evolution not revolution” territory. Because of course he evolves, but he doesn’t revolve.

By the time he had lost a few matches and the pressure was on, McClaren had left himself very little room to manoeuvre cliche-wise, but still had one to fall back on: “We need to make Wembley a fortress,” he said, with a series of crucial qualifiers coming up at England’s home ground.

Today in 2007 England suffered there first defeat at the new Wembley, in just their second outing under the giant arch. The first match had been a creditable draw with Brazil, but it was England’s old nemesis Germany that inflicted the first loss at their gleaming new football home.

In a nice bit of symmetry, it was Germany who were the last team to beat England at the old Wembley in 2000 but England proved a giant arch made them no more effective than the twin towers against the Germans.



Frank Lampard had given the hosts an early lead before trademark Paul Robinson mistake allowed Kevin Kuranyi to tap home an equaliser. England had the chances to level but Michael Owen, Kieron Dyer and Frank Lampard all failed to capitalise before Christian Pander, on his international debut, thundered an unstoppable shot past Paul Robinson to win the match for ze Germans.

Alan Shearer was not impressed. He said: “Before the game, we were looking for two things: a good result and a good performance. Clearly we didn’t get the first and I don’t think we got the second either. It was average.”

Chris Waddle was even more downbeat. “Overall, Germany gave us a football lesson,” he said, before adding ruefully: “It just seems to be getting worse.”

How much worse would become apparent when Fortress Wembley crumbled again when Croatia came to town in November.

Here is Pander scoring his thunderbolt winner. Striker! As ever, we will be back with more tomorrow, but to tide you over until then, click here to see which programme was aired for the first ever time on this day.

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