So, those crosses then. For the last few months there has been a faint but still discernible background rumble to David Moyes's time at Manchester United, a sense of a distant clanking around in the armoury, of daggers unsheathed, crossbows raised and tossed aside, suits of armour skittering across the tiles.
Being a manager is by definition a transient occupation. Football managers are basically born to be fired, cast from the earliest days as patsies and fall-guys, shoved out front to draw the ire of the crowd from failings higher up, and retaining even in the good times an air of the sanatorium patient, lurking palely on the touchline, pyjamas sticking out the bottom of their trousers, twitching and fretting and whirling around at the first clank of the scythe in the shadows. This probably explains why so much effort is expended on looking for signs: the first sneeze, the first shiver of weakness, the detail that will harden up into some decisive managerial murder weapon.
For Moyes, in the wake of the home draw with Fulham last weekend, there is a new front-runner: crosses, or specifically the 81 crosses United delivered at Old Trafford. It is a statistic Moyes was still being asked to defend in midweek, and which for many observers has seemed to codify something – that lingering air of tactical bluntness, the sense that this is a man who has come to a light sabre-battle-waving a baguette, a manager handed the keys to one of Europe's high-spec luxury footballing saloons who seems intent on padding his way around the track with the engine stalled and his great pale furry feet poking down between the pedals. This is clearly unfair on Moyes, who may not be the answer to everything but who has inherited not just a team but a club in decline.
In the end it's not the crosses that are going to do for Moyes, but four years of slow-cooked retreat, the ghost-ship momentum of Ferguson's late successes and above all the identities of the men actually doing the crosses. Wing play has been an element of the Manchester United blueprint since the club's resurrection after the second world war. It is just that the men charged with carrying this out have tended to do so with a little more precision than, say, Ashley Young or the ever-willing Chris Smalling, who never shies from trying to style himself as a ball-playing centre-half but still totters around the attacking part of the pitch like an oversized Victorian hatstand that has magically come to life and is, to its great credit, somehow carrying on as a top-class professional footballer.
Mainly, though, it is unfair on the poor old cross, which has been portrayed in the last week as the latest byword for tactical primitivism. Crosses may be out of fashion, but the cross has a noble heritage, not to mention an enduring sense of basic athletic grace, just as Andy Carroll's header against Sweden in Kiev was undoubtedly the high point of England's Euro 2012 campaign, Carroll drawn inexorably into the path of Steven Gerrard's brilliant whipped right-wing cross like a startled horse hoovered up by a passing tornado.
For better or worse the history of the England team is basically a history of crosses, a narrative of the pinged, swerved, dinked, dipped, whipped and scuffed. Two thirds of Geoff Hurst's World Cup hat-trick, every single goal scored by England at the 1990 World Cup, not to mention the last six goals scored by England in any kind of tournament: all came from crosses.
Possibly there is something innate in all this, a style of football that was always likely to emerge from a cramped, boggy, rainy, wind-blown kind of place where it's usually best not to dwell on the fine details and keep half an eye on the skies. On the other hand it might have something to do with English football's own insistent belief in the basic virtue of crosses.
The Football Association's historic coaching manual Soccer Tactics and Skills – still in use, incidentally, when Moyes was doing his coaching badges at Lilleshall – contains a whole chapter devoted to "flank and diagonal crosses" and talks in muscular detail about the prime target area and moving into the prime target area plus, of course, attacking different parts of the prime target area, all dotted with excitably reductive statistics ("32% of goals come from crosses! … 21.5% of all goals are from headers!").
It is easy to mock these garden-shed simplifications, but it is also a sign of English football's basic confusion that nobody has ever come up with a rigorous methodical alternative to all this, an answer to the basic question of how exactly we're supposed to play this game. The most recent Football Association how-to guide, the Future Game, reads more like a journal of shared recovery from some horribly scarring past-life experience, concerned above all with matters of behaviour and etiquette and generally reassuring everybody that it's all OK now the bad men in tracksuits have gone.
Meanwhile, in the real world, crosses linger on vaguely. Elite level football is basically a wrangle in the margins, a search for space. Attack is no longer just attack, but is instead counterattack and counter-counterattack. Above all you've just got to hang on to the ball and with this in mind the high-risk, old-school cross – with all due respect to the prime target area – is pretty much a non-starter.
And yet it would be wrong to discard the cross completely. The evidence of the last two international tournaments is that one thing worse than an English team that crosses the ball too much is an English team that staggers about in pursuit of some ill-fitting version of footballing modernity, Germany in hob-nailed boots. Perhaps for now it is time simply to embrace the old ways a little more, to become more refined at the things – running, tackling, heading, crossing – English players can actually do, and to appreciate rather than scorn while it still lingers on, the doomed, transgressive art of the aerial game.
