1 SELECT THE RIGHT SQUAD
Picking a World Cup squad is a lot like following a recipe.
Well, according to Christian Ziege, anyway. “If you’re cooking, you need a bit of salt, pepper, you need everything,” explains the ex-Germany full-back. “If you just put salt in your food, it’s salty and not tasty. You need the right balance.”
That’s Ziege’s assessment of what went wrong for the Euro 96 winners at the World Cup two years later, when a side bristling with experience was battered 3-0 by Croatia in the quarter-finals. He blames “too many problems”, “too many players who expected to be in the first XI” and “too many players who thought they were leaders”.
On the face of it, having too many good senior players sounds like a dream, but as many international managers have found to their cost down the years, simply stacking a squad with the best players a nation can muster isn’t a path to guaranteed success.
That’s why France boss Didier Deschamps has made a habit of leaving players at some of the world’s top clubs in the international wilderness. Just ask Aymeric Laporte, ignored by Les Bleus for so long that he decided to represent Spain instead.
“What I learned in my first camp was that I couldn’t pick my best 23 players because that would never make the best team,” says Belgium coach Roberto Martinez. “When I say the best team, that means in every aspect, not just playing a game or two in the space of 10 days.”
Part of that is keeping faith in a core group, rather than chopping and changing as form fluctuates. Fans and the media may ask why certain players curry so much favour with the international boss, but their involvement is key to maintaining a settled group.
“I always had 16 or 17 players who were the same in each squad,” divulges former Switzerland manager Ottmar Hitzfeld. “You can’t change national teams too much, you need a core group of players. If a player has a small crisis in club football, you must keep in mind that his national team is a different team in a different environment and they can play well with you again.”
It’s an approach that also worked for Alf Ramsey in 1966, as he created a
