In a perfect world the chances are Jamie Carragher would go back, at least for a few matches, on his decision to end his England career. He would, you have to believe, be able to see the need, not so much for himself, and certainly not for some ego-massaging accumulation of caps, but for the country whose shirt he wore 34 times, and with never less than rampaging commitment.
Unfortunately, the world of England's international football is not only less than perfect, it is too often less than merely competent. It operates a star system that would have given Hollywood an even worse name than it has; it makes one rule for the glory boys, who know who they are even more than we do, and one for the others, the foot soldiers, the guys who do what they are asked, when they are asked, and then slip away into the margins.
Jamie Carragher, who with injuries to most of his rivals has rarely been needed so urgently by his country, has never been one of the glory boys. He never tried to doctor the adenoidal ferocity of his Bootle accent, never slaved to get himself in the picture, except when a sharp-eyed cameraman picked up, as he did, on a moment of acute danger in the defensive lines of Liverpool or England.
Like a few who spring to mind across the generations, starting with Nobby Stiles through the likes of Tommy Smith and Ian Callaghan, Norman Hunter, Peter Beardsley, Bryan Robson, and Paul Scholes, the player whose earlier departure from the international scene still leaves a gaping hole in England's midfield, Carragher has always been a footballer's footballer. The celebrity culture might have been proceeding on another planet.
When, smarting under the final cut in the spring, his exclusion from the European qualifier against Estonia to make way for both Ledley King and Wes Brown, he said that it was time to concentrate on club football, he was accused, from the shot and shell of a broadcasting booth, of being a "bottler", a pro not willing to fight for his place. Carragher, arguably the most implacable pure defender of his generation, eventually stifled his rage and said, "I've committed 12 years of my career to England, but I've been thinking now is the time to concentrate 100 per cent on Liverpool.
"I'm 29 now and I have to accept if I'm not a regular starter at this stage of my England career, I don't think I'll ever be. It's going to be difficult for me to be seen as anything more than a squad player, and that's not what I'm interested in now."
Comparisons may be invidious but at least one is unavoidable. It is with the decision-making of Carragher's former England captain David Beckham, who, while electing to take the huge and easy money of the third-rate American Major League Soccer, insists that he cannot bear to surrender his place in the England team – at least until he acquires 100 caps which would draw him, outlandishly some rigorous critics would say, into the company of titans like Bobby Moore and Sir Bobby Charlton.
In response, the England coach Steve McClaren, who is now required to go on bended knee to a Carragher he had earlier convinced was one of the team's most disposable assets, suggests he is willing to fly to America in order monitor Beckham's "progress" over there.
The implication cannot be missed. Beckham, even after he handed back the England captaincy unbidden in the wake of another World Cup disaster, is still able to snap his fingers and get the appropriate response from the England hierarchy – a situation that was enshrined almost from the moment Sven Goran Eriksson took office.
It has never been remotely like that for England soldiers like Scholes and Carragher. Scholes had to fit in with the requirements of team-mates like Beckham, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard whatever the evidence he provided that, in the matter of shaping a game, and understanding the subtleties of playmaking, he operated in a different and distinctly superior street.
Part of Carragher's frustration, no doubt, is that he knows that, in purely technical terms, he is roughly twice as reliable as the first name consistently down in England's defensive list, Rio Ferdinand. When Ferdinand's partner, John Terry, was injured, Carragher, who has been asked to play at full-back, central defence and as a holding midfielder, assumed that he would walk into the team in his best position. He should have known better. Following one game he was dropped after starting as a holding midfielder – an astonishing abberation – before filling in for the injured Gary Neville at right-back. Falling behind King and Jonathan Woodgate was, he believed, the point of no return.
It was an entirely rational decision, one made without anything like the same kind of provocation and at around the same age, by Alan Shearer, who is of course widely revered as one of the ultimate professionals.
This is a status Carragher has also won for himself, at least in the mind of a defender who happens to be one of only nine living Englishmen who know what it takes to win a World Cup. George Cohen says of the Liverpool man: "For so long, Carragher has for me been the outstanding England defender.
"OK, he's not flashy on the ball, anything but in fact, but as a defender he has brilliant understanding of what he has to do. He reads situations so well, his timing is great and if you are under the cosh you couldn't get anyone more reliable.
"Sometimes I look at big-name players like Rio Ferdinand and Ashley Cole and I ask my wife, on the off chance that she is listening, 'Has anyone ever taught these lads to defend, really defend?' But then I never ask that question of Jamie Carragher. Some things you can't teach a defender. It is pure instinct and Carragher has that."
But does he have forbearance? Does he have the grace to remember the pride he felt when he first played for England, when he still believed that, if you did your stuff, you got your reward? The hunch here was that he does, though that was before the word coming out of Merseyside last night was not so encouraging. Patriots will no doubt say that answering his country's call is the least to be expected from a hugely rewarded footballer, but it is maybe not quite as simple as that. Certainly Steve McClaren should be the last man to pretend that it is.
... and it gets even more fustrating when just because lampard is so incompetent at defending, Gerrard had to do all he dirty work for him... wtf...
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