James Lawton: FA compromise with lame duck leader is one of English football's greatest tragedies

What a way to go into a World Cup, what a way to entrust the hopes of a football nation and the stewardship of a generation of players who are supposed to have the best chance of landing the great prize since Sir Alf Ramsey's heroes of 1966.

It should be a time of single-minded, bright-eyed purpose. Instead, England go to the summer finals not with the fervour instilled by a common purpose and a common dream. They go under the command of a man who wouldn't know the difference between a call to glory and the glint of a main chance.

However the Football Association dressed it up in its Soho Square offices last night, however much Sven Goran Eriksson assured the nation that he had the backing of both his players and his bosses, there was a cold and sickening reality.

It was that Eriksson is the lame duck leader that now nobody really wants.

He has become a full-blown embarrassment to the FA after the final evidence, provided in his entrapment by the News of the World, that not only was he looking beyond the challenge of the World Cup, he was ready to scheme actively for his next horizon to be as lucrative as it could be ­ and damn the consequences to his reputation, not to mention the livelihood of the Aston Villa manager, David O'Leary.

Eriksson's players, not to mention the nation that welcomed him and backed him against all the evidence of his faltering grasp of the demands of the job, have heard him talk about his financial requirements ­ £5m a year tax-free ­ to a prospective employer he had just met, and casually disparage the footballers who are now expected to battle their way to the mountain top of international football on his behalf.

What kind of dynamic does this provide for the ultimate challenge in the world game? One of only shaming cynicism.

The FA, after years of wavering, after the shocking decision to reward Eriksson's covert negotiations with Chelsea with a massive rise and an extended contract, have come up with a compromise that tears apart any sense of a united English front in Germany in the summer.

Some will say that the FA had no option but to stick with Eriksson even though his credibility was shot through. Where would they get a successor in the brief time before the action starts? They could have made a call to patriotism; they could have called up an English football man with passion and a proven instinct for leadership. They could have gone to Manchester City or Charlton Athletic and said that English football needed their help, very badly, and that perhaps this was a time when a game oozing in so much TV money it can make millionaires of a legion of agents should, however briefly, make the national team a priority.

The suspicion here is that the City manager, Stuart Pearce, a passionate character with a superb playing pedigree in the England team, or Alan Curbishley, a performer of wonders in carrying Charlton into a permanent place in the Premiership who learnt his trade in the old academy of World Cup winners Bobby Moore, Martin Peters and Sir Geoff Hurst at West Ham, would have answered the call.

Consider the call to arms ­ and decency ­ that would have represented to a football public bewildered by recent events and who, after all their demonstrations of national pride, were so bemused by England's failure to exploit the promise of their appearances in the quarter-finals of the World Cup and the European Championship.

It is not as though Eriksson has anything like an imposing track record when international football reaches that point where it separates the ultimate winners and the losers. Sure there is a competence, a safe enough pair of hands, when it comes to the chore of qualifying for the big tournaments, but given the talent at Eriksson's disposal, was that such a measurement of coaching and leadership acumen? It didn't seem so when 10-man Brazil were able to cruise to victory in Japan four years ago and when England, suddenly denied the precocious brilliance of Wayne Rooney, imploded so dismally in Portugal in the 2004 European Championship.

Last night, the FA chief executive, Brian Barwick, talked about a productive day which had left Eriksson in charge until the finals, after which he would depart with best wishes.

Best wishes for what? For a football future underpinned by the richest contract ever awarded to a national coach, and for what? A football regime which became nothing so much as a private club, presided over by a coach who felt able to tell a potential employer that he could deliver the England captain like some dazzling trinket.

The FA should have told Eriksson yesterday that he had gone too far along his road of self-interest, neglected too much the duty to be seen as a man with a singular mission.

That was to transmit a sense of purpose and commitment into every corner of England's international team, a feeling of unity and ambition of the kind which so lifted ill-considered South Korea under the command of the veteran Dutchman Guus Hiddink in the last World Cup.

Hiddink, a highly successful club manager at PSV Eindhoven in recent years, has also had time to guide the Socceroos of Australia into only the second World Cup finals in their history. Now here is an old-style football man, a chip off the old block of men like Ramsey and the father of Dutch football, Rinus Michels; men for whom football wasn't so much a passport to the rich life as a central passion. When Eriksson finally moves on, Hiddink might just be seen as the acceptable face of a foreign coach.

Meanwhile, though, Wayne Rooney and Michael Owen, David Beckham and Steve Gerrard, Frank Lampard and John Terry are obliged to follow the lead of the time-expired man whose greatest challenge now is to make a virtue of standing still. It is his self-inflicted trial ­ and English football's tragedy.

Neville should learn from Rooney mature way to face provocation

In defence of Gary Neville's shirt-clutching gloat in front of the Liverpool supporters at Old Trafford on Sunday, it has been pointed out that some of their chants included slurs against his family. That was not pleasant at all but it's just not a good enough explanation for why one of the game's senior professionals should continue to behave in such immature fashion.

Indeed, you have to say the older the much-honoured Neville gets ­ he will be 31 next month ­ the sillier he seems to become.

If ever there was a victory to savour in sober terms, it was surely the last-minute one Neville's United achieved over a Liverpool who in most areas of the game had been superior.

But instead of such reflection, Neville's reaction was near to dementia. Instead of gratitude for a kind fate there was a gibbering statement that winning, however you do it, is all that matters. It wouldn't have sat well in a poorly disciplined schoolyard. After running away from the celebrations of his team-mates and directly towards the Liverpool fans, he tugged at his shirt in the area of his heart, making an indomitable image out of a distinctly fortunate circumstance ­ or as one old and crusty denizen of the Blackburn Rovers press box once said of extravagant self-congratulation for a fairly modest deed: "He's made a buggering banquet out of a cheese biscuit."

One cannot imagine Neville's old captain Roy Keane being impressed by Neville's manic posturing.

The point about Neville's headless performance on Sunday is that United are fighting for their lives ­ and their fading status as the greatest club in England ­ and they might reasonably have expected more from one of their most experienced players.

When Wayne Rooney made angry gestures to the crowd at Anfield on his first return to Merseyside he was given a huge lecture on the need to grow up. This seems to be happening. On Sunday he was head and shoulders above anyone else on the field. Last season he went to his old ground, Goodison Park, and faced a reception of vast, sneering hostility. His reaction was impeccable. Wayne Rooney is 20. Old enough, though, the evidence is beginning to accumulate, to take Gary Neville in hand.

NBA stands firm over discipline

Any sense of grievance felt by Arjen Robben over the yellow and red cards he received for celebrating a goal among the Chelsea fans last week may be eased by the story of Antonio Davis of the New York Knicks, who went into the stands in Chicago, he insists, only because he believed his wife, Kendra, was being threatened.

Before handing down his sentence, the National Basketball Association senior vice-chairman Stu Jackson said: "We have made it clear to our players and our fans that players may not enter the spectator stands no matter the provocation, and that violations of this policy will be treated with the utmost seriousness. We have concluded, however, that Antonio's actions were the result of his belief that his family members required immediate assistance. We have thus taken these mitigating circumstances into consideration."

The prelude to yet another compromise when superstar sportsmen step out of line? It's a reasonable guess, but in North America they really do believe the image of professional sports needs to be underpinned by firm discipline. Davis was given a five-game suspension at a cost of about $700,000 (£395,000).