Ferdinand's banishment leaves England off the pace

The spell has at last been broken, the contract of compromise torn up. When England face Austria this afternoon, the team's relationship with their manager will be changed forever by the prospect of Ferdinand taking his place on the bench instead of among those players who thought their first-team days were endless.

This is a squad that has grown up knowing only a Premiership of bountiful rewards, an era that English football will surely, some time in the future, consider the good old days: for the salaries, the status and the security. Come this morning every one of the certainties that this gilded generation may have entertained will seem just a little less secure.

The consensus management that has served Eriksson so well over the last four- and-a-half years is a policy to which he can never return now that he has responded to one of the worst defeats in the history of English football by making an example of Ferdinand. The defeat to Northern Ireland in Belfast on 7 September was epochal for so many reasons but most of all because it altered the relationship between Eriksson and his players forever. He was stunned by their fecklessness and he has responded in kind.

It is so hard to see Eriksson as the ball-breaker of the locker-room, the bully with the whistle and the clipboard because, in spite of his failings, he is a courteous, inoffensive man who, struggled yesterday to come up with any previous examples of his managerial ruthlessness.

He made some vague references to dropping Roberto Baggio at Fiorentina and claimed he had fallen out with Clarence Seedorf at Sampdoria. It cannot have been that serious, however, because the records show that in his one season at the club, 1995-96, the Dutchman played 32 out of 34 league games and the two he missed were through injury and suspension.

Perhaps only Giancarlo Mazza, an Italian lawyer of no great fame, can really tell us what it feels like to be coldly disposed of by Eriksson: it was he who was taken out for lunch by the Swede in 1998 to be told that he would soon be losing his then wife Nancy Dell'Olio to the man who was Lazio coach at the time.

This time, Eriksson said that he began the week with his players, in the tradition of great English drama, with a "long monologue" and by the time he reached the bloody denouement on Thursday, it was one of the most famous football reputations in the country that had been slain.

The speech, according to sources, centred upon Eriksson's disapproval of the attitude of his players over the friendly against Denmark in August and the World Cup qualifiers against Wales and Northern Ireland and by removing Ferdinand he evidently feels that the very worst attitude in the team is gone. What it does leave him with, is a defence of Luke Young, Sol Campbell, John Terry and Jamie Carragher that is long on experience and yet desperately short of pace.

The powers of recovery that Ferdinand's dazzling pace afforded was an insurance against the empty-headed misjudgements which he is afflicted by occasionally. It is not a luxury that Terry has been able to rely on and there is an argument for saying that his concentration is the better for it. Campbell is by far the quickest of the back four but, at 31, he is no sprinter, and England's first concern is that they are not called upon, against Austria or Poland, to deal with an attack of serious speed.

While Eriksson administered his own brand of justice to the defence, he was classically undermined in the debate over whether Frank Lampard had assumed penalty-taking responsibilities from David Beckham. Eriksson was not sure whether Beckham's conversation with him over his misgivings about continuing as penalty-taker had pre-dated the one the England captain had with his team-mate. As usual, Eriksson could not see the serious issue at stake: whether or not Beckham had taken the decision unilaterally.

Those oversights that Eriksson suffers from, the imprecision in logging the small details among his players that could one day have enormous consequences, is the main way in which he opens himself up to criticism.

He will feel, in the exclusion of Ferdinand, that he has already taken the major decision of the week but in a game that, at its most competitive, is about the finest of margins his vagueness on detail is continually unsettling.

Today will be the first time since October 1999, and a friendly against Belgium that there is not a single Manchester United player in the starting line-up. The great decisive moment could belong to Lampard rather than Beckham now that the Chelsea man seems to be the penalty-taker. The changes are significant, and over the next five days their implications could be huge.