Today I'm going back 16 years to 2006 and England's European Championships Qualifying match against the minnows of Andorra. The match was played at Old Trafford, Manchester and was attended by 56,290.
The programme cover star is, of course, England's centre-back Rio Ferdinand who didn't feature in the game itself. Ferdinand began his professional career at West Ham United making his first team debut at the age of 17 and making 158 appearances (2 goals) in all for the Hammers before Leeds United broke the British transfer record when signing him for £18 Million in 2000, a deal making him the world's most expensive defender at the time. Sadly for Leeds United, their financial melt down was just around the corner and they were obliged to offload Ferdinand to deadly rivals Manchester United in 2002 for another British transfer record fee, this time £30 Million. Ferdinand would stay at Old Trafford for almost all of the rest of his career making 455 appearances and scoring 8 goals before leaving in 2014 for a brief swansong with QPR. Ferdinand is recognised as being one of England's best-ever defenders, winning 6 Premier League titles as well as the Champions League in 2008 and he managed 709 club appearances (13 goals) before hanging his boots up. For England, Ferdinand earned 81 caps (3 goals). I admit to admiring Rio and in particular the great dignity that he showed when having to deal with his wife's cancer and subsequent death. Rio makes an excellent role model for mental health.
The featured game was England's 844th ever International and was only manager Steve McClaren's second game in charge following England's disappointing showing that summer at the World Cup in Germany. Perhaps surprisingly England appeared at number five in FIFA's official rankings at the time of this game whilst Andorra were to be found at number 132. The game was expected to be something of a mismatch and the only real question was how many would England score? The answer was five which seems to be about par for such mismatches. In truth Andorra were very poor and failed to mount an attack at any stage in proceedings.
England's first goal was scored by one of my personal favourites, robot-man and Liverpool and England number nine Peter Crouch in just the fifth minute following good work by Jermain Defoe. England's second wasn't long in coming and was slammed home by another Liverpool player, Steven Gerrard, in the 13th minute. In the 38th minute it was Jermain Defoe's turn to get on the score sheet, easily poking home Steven Gerrard's teasing cross. 3-0 at half time became 4-0 within 2 minutes of the resumption and it was Defoe once again who scored it, latching on to an attacking header by Phil Neville. Peter Crouch was to have the final word as far as the score line was concerned with England's fifth and his second of the evening in the 66th minute which was a trademark header from substitute Aaron Lennon's fine cross.
Despite the comfortable result and solid performance by England in the featured game, their Qualifying Group was anything but comfortable. With the top two from the Group of seven set to qualify, England made unnecessarily hard work of it and ended up failing to pick up the single point needed from their final match against Croatia on a rainy night at Wembley. Croatia and Russia took the top two places and England didn't feature in the 2008 European Championship Finals held in Austria and Switzerland that summer.
CRB Match No. 1515
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