BECKHAM SNUB IS A DISGRACE

FOOTBALL


SO STUART Pearce, true to form, tried to prove he is a good football manager by omitting David Beckham from his Olympics squad. That is what you get when you put someone like Pearce in charge of the Great Britain football team.
The man is simply not a natural manager - so he attempts to convince us he is by dropping the one man who could lift spirits in the squad - and sell tickets for it, too.
Pearce's decision is easy to fathom: by dropping Becks he wanted to show us that he is his own man, that he can make difficult choices. He says he dropped Becks 'purely on football reasons'. Well, I don't believe him - I believe he snubbed one of the greatest players of our generation purely to elevate himself as a man who does what he wants and is a strong man.
In actual fact, he is a weak man by doing that. He has exiled Becks to the wilderness - and yet has put together a squad that is unbalanced and, in some cases, frankly bewildering.
While Brazil will have the likes of the wonderful Neymar, Spain will have Mata and Uruguay will have Luis Suarez, Great Britain boasts Southampton's Jack Cork and Bolton's Marvin Sordell. I would be amazed if more than 2 per cent of the readers of this column have heard of either player.
The three premitted over-age players are Ryan Giggs, Craig Bellamy and Micah Richards. I would not have taken Bellamy - Becks would have been my third choice, although I cannot dispute the inclusion of Giggs or Richards.
Giggsy is the obvious man to lead the side and Richards should certainly have been in the England squad that went to Euro 2012, certainly ahead of Liverpool's Martin Kelly!
Pearce's teams are usually dour and resilient - much like the man himself, who failed spectacularly as a manager at club level. How he ever get so far into the England set-up remains one of life's mysteries. Certainly, I applaud Roy Hodgson for making it one of his first decisions to cast Pearce aside and bring Gary Neville into the full England set-up.
I believe that Neville is a much better long-term candidate for the full England job than Pearce - who fancies himself in the role - would ever be.
With Pearce at the helm, I would be very surprised if Team GB get further than making it out of the group as runners-up - then fall to the first team they meet in the knockout stage.
Team GB's group is a fairly comfortable one - with Senegal, Uruguay and the United Arab Emiratest lying in wait.
Surely we can expect them to beat the UAE and Senegal? But I would imagine Uruguay will prove too tough a test.
So they should get out of the group, but does Pearce have the players or the powers of motivation and inspiration to progress beyond that?
Maybe that will be the point he will privately wish he had chosen Beckham - who has all those qualities.  

FRANK WORRALL