Rampaging Richards cannot conceal cracks

Matt Dickinson, Chief Sports Correspondent

Quick as a sprinter, powerful as a boxer and with the swagger to excel probably in both those disciplines, Micah Richards is the best thing to happen to the England team since Wayne Rooney. He is a 50-plus caps man and, at long last, is the answer to the question of how we will cope when Gary Neville runs out of steam.

Richards could be England’s Lilian Thuram, perhaps even going on to be their very own Marcel Desailly moving seamlessly between centre half and midfield, and yet, despite being all of these things, Richards is probably not helping Sir Trevor Brooking to sleep at night. Richards is an individual story of hope, amid a sea of despair if the FA’s director of football development is to believed.

Taking into account his role and his natural restraint, Brooking offered almost an apocalyptic vision of England’s footballing future last week. His quotes were underplayed, given that here was a man at the heart of the sport fearing that the national game is being damaged inexorably by the number of foreign imports.

A particular worry of Brooking was the failure of the academies in England to produce skilled forwards, the creative types, but he needs to look far deeper than the domestic talent factories filled with European, South American and African teenagers if he is to attack the root cause. This is a problem that goes back to the parks, where, on thousands of pitches, a national psyche is revealed that is inconsistent with a successful international football team.

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The English sporting culture is one where brawn is worshipped over brain, where a crunching tackle is cheered louder than a pirouette and, most ludicrous of all, where a defender can still be applauded for chasing back to head the ball to his goalkeeper, even at Premier League level. English crowds are like a cinema audience that cheers at all the wrong bits of a film.

This particular England team have their technical merits but their lack of guile continues to be shown up at the big tournaments.

Richards was never going to be a one-man answer to these concerns, any more than, after years of teenage hype, Joe Cole is going to turn into the next Zinédine Zidane, or Ashley Young, for all his promise, is going to be the next Thierry Henry.

Ironically, Richards was tutored at Brazilian soccer schools run by Simon Clifford, the maverick coach who is on a one-man mission to transform the English footballing culture, but it is still the defender’s physicality rather than samba skills that catch the eye. Richards’s control is not at all bad, but it is his pace, power and boldness that have really impressed the England staff.

“They might be playing well for their club, but it’s all about when they join up, their first training session,” Steve McClaren, the head coach, said. “Can they handle the occasion? Have they got the character? Can they mix well? And Richards, just from day one, breezed in. He was vocal, he was aggressive, he wanted the ball and he had no fear.”

Richards is so confident that he was ordering David Beckham to hang back while he went on the rampage against in the friendly against Germany at Wembley last month and Shaun Wright-Phillips was left to mop up on occasions against Israel on Saturday as the full back surged down the wing.

Richards is a centre half at Manchester City, but with his speed not always able to rescue him from positional mistakes at the highest level, the international coaches see him as a right back for the foreseeable future. And England have needed one, given that Neville, who will welcome the challenge rather than fear it, has been impeded by injuries.

Richards will be even more emboldened having used his prodigious leap to score England’s third goal at Wembley on Saturday. It was his first international goal in only his sixth appearance and, having headed home, he raced over to the terraces and then pointed to the name on his back as if to say: “Take a good look because I’m going to be around for years.”

Graham Taylor, the former England manager, predicted that Richards would be a regular for the next decade, but while every country would love to have a defender with such power, they would also recognise that his qualities are just part of the mix - and not even the most important ingredient.

“There is no short answer to the problem of lack of skill in English football,” Brooking once said, and that was in his autobiography published in 1981, when he was plain old Trevor.

More than 25 years later, the song remains the same and Brooking will be sticking to it, however impressed he was by Richards’s display at the weekend.