“Trying to get the best out of everyone around me.” And that is what he does best. Players such as Duff, Keane and John O’Shea, and lesser names – Richard Dunne, Colin Healy and Gary Doherty – are his players He has regard for them, and they respond. When Kerr talks, his points of reference go deep into youth football. It all makes for a “Club Kerr” approach.Dare it be said but, in many ways, Kerr is reminiscent of Sir Alex Ferguson For Beckham and Giggs, read Duff and Robbie Keane. There is that same paternal approach, that same attention – chan-nelled, of course, in a different way. He would be the perfect national manager for Roy Keane, a player the Irish still desperately miss But that story now belongs to another era.

Kerr’s does not.Group Ten PWDLFAPts Switzerland633012712 Rep of Ire63129810 Russia52121197 Albania61238115 Georgia5113384 Remaining fixtures: 6 Sept: Republic of Ireland v Russia, Georgia v Albania 10 Sept: Russia v Switzerland, Albania v Georgia. 11 Oct: Russia v Georgia, Switzerland v Republic of Ireland.. Using the figures from David Beckham’s England career under Sven Goran Eriksson to make a point about the captain’s supposed fallibility comes into a statistical category defined by the 19th century humourist Andrew Lang as “like a drunken man using a lamppost – for support rather than illumination”. By definition, he has thus played in Eriksson’s four defeats: at home to Holland, Italy and Australia, and in the World Cup quarter-final by Brazil.On the first three of those occasions, however, the manager indulged in his policy of mass substitutions during friendly matches, withdrawing the captain at half-time. Only against the Brazilians has Beckham played 90 minutes of a losing game under the Swede.

True, he was faulted by some for jumping out of a tackle that led to Rivaldo’s equalising goal, but would an England team already without Steven Gerrard and Owen Hargreaves seriously have been more likely to reach the semi-final without Beckham? Hardly.Lists of results do not convey the sense of a performance, either from a team or an individual. Even so, there are hints from Beckham’s appearance among the goalscorers of how he took games like the World Cup qualifiers at home to Finland and Greece by the scruff of the neck and retrieved a potentially catastrophic losing position each time: his efforts in the latter game at (appropriately) Old Trafford constituted one of the great single-handed performances of recent times. This international season he has scored as many times in six appearances as the supposedly prolific Michael Owen in nine.It was also Beckham’s absence that forced the desperate measure of a change before half-time on Wednesday, unheard of under Eriksson’s stewardship. The lethal combination of Gerrard’s tendency to drift inside and gung-ho defending by Danny Mills and Ashley Cole was creating such problems that it was necessary to move the steadier Phil Neville to full-back and ask Hargreaves to provide a more reliable wide outlet and linking role as an ersatz Beckham. “We should have pushed more from the midfield, giving better support to the two up front, and you know that Hargreaves will push, and Gerrard too, even when he’s sitting,” Eriksson explained.”I could have waited, but you are under 1-0 and see that you want to change something. We were badly organised on one or two occasions in the first half and had to try and prevent them counterattacking. We were taking wrong decisions – you go with a midfielder and go with a full-back on the same side and suddenly you lose the ball, and whoosh! But it was not the formation, I don’t think it was the diamond.

We didn’t change the organisation, we changed a couple of players.”The diamond, it seems, is forever, and was not, contrary to the suggestion in some quarters, abandoned in the far more successful second half. It had first appeared in an identical situation, with England 1-0 down to Slovakia in Bratislava last October, after which, as Eriksson put it: “From the first minute of the second half, it was another music.” Whether or not it was his coach at the time, Steve McClaren, who was responsible for the singing in the rain thereafter, Eriksson deserves credit for Wednesday’s decisive change of personnel.The bonus from it, over and above two goals and an eventually deserved victory, was Gerrard’s performance in his redefined role as the midfield anchorman. No anchor can ever have been as mobile while remaining secure; without allowing Slovakia any of the opportunities to counter that Neville had been unable to prevent, the Merseysider was also able to make the play, offering a wider range of passing – culminating in his perfect cross for the winning goal – and even surging forward to shoot. “He can sit, he’s clever, but he can also push more, and in the future I guess that would be his position,” Eriksson suggested.