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Scoring against Besiktas and Austria is all well and good, but ever since he started scoring regularly for Liverpool big Peter has faced accusations of being what cricketers would call a flat-track bully. He can score hat-tricks against Jamaica, says popular opinion, but against half-decent teams he forgets where the net is.
There is, in all fairness, an element of truth in this - certainly for his country. For England, Crouch has scored - and won - against Uruguay, Hungary, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Greece, Andorra, Macedonia, Estonia and Austria. Against Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Portugal and Sweden, on the other hand, he has never troubled the scorers, and only the Argentina game was won.
For Liverpool it's not quite as clear-cut, because any Premiership side - with the obvious and rather sad exception of Derby - are comfortably better than any of the international sides Crouch has scored against, and while his scoring record in the league is not of the highest he's scored a few, including of course a delicious hat-trick - proper, old-fashioned hat-trick: right foot, left foot, head - in a 4-1 lesson we dished out to Arsenal last season. But when you think of Crouch, you generally think of three-goal hauls in a drubbing of Fenerbahce, not vital winners against top Premiership sides.
So he probably is a bit of a flat-track bully. What I want to say is that that's not such a bad thing.
Look at it this way. We weren't exactly struggling against Besiktas, but nor were we threatening to tear them apart, until Crouch's persistence won a rebound off their (awful) keeper and his reactions put it away. Austria were a poor team, but no-one but Crouch got on the scoresheet. Similarly against Macedonia, and it was him who broke an embarrassing deadlock against Trinidad and Tobago during the World Cup (before Gerrard gave the performance a gloss it didn't merit with a lovely left-foot goal from outside the area, if memory serves).
The usual, and witless, mantra about there being no easy games in European or international football these days is, of course, wrong. A game against Andorra, Total Network Solutions, San Marino or Toulouse is very definitely an easy game. But you do know that every one of those teams will park a row of four at the back and five across midfield with instructions to kick anything that moves, and leave some hapless donkey up front to chase anything that might come back up if we get frustrated and start defending too high.
Admittedly, this shouldn't be hard to do something about. If you watch the top international sides - and it need hardly be said that I don't count England here - they keep the ball, move it around, wait for gaps, show patience. Arsenal do it in the Premiership, Barca in La Liga. For some reason English players, brainwashed from a young age into believing that "spirit" and "commitment" and "passion" are a match for tactics and technique, get angry if their minnowish opponents don't break down after fifteen minutes, and start launching long balls in to the box in the vague hope that something will happen.
I'm always reminded at those points of General Melchett in Blackadder, ordering his men to attack the German lines by walking very slowly towards their machine guns, just like the previous seventeen times - because only a madman would do the same thing eighteen times in a row when it clearly isn't working. It's the last thing they'll expect! Similarly, against England - and to an extent against Liverpool; see how close to getting away with it Fulham were with it the other day - teams know that if they turn up, work hard, and don't push too far up the field, they have a puncher's chance of nicking a 0-0 or even a 1-0 on the break, but England keep, metaphorically, walking their troops very slowly towards the machine-gun nests.
The sensible thing to do, then, would be to teach English kids to keep the ball, to play with patience, to wait for the gaps. The trouble is that that requires the sort of long-term planning and sensible decision-making that has long been shown to be beyond football administrators in general and English ones in particular. The Lilleshall centre for excellence fell down in the face of clubs who were unwilling to leave their promising English hopefuls in the hands of the FA, but equally unwilling actually to let them play ahead of their latest nineteen-year-old Argentinean signing. If Israel had rolled over against Russia (and respect must be paid to the proud way in which they refused to do so) England would have to face up to their uselessness and, perhaps, start the sort of root-and-branch upheaval that might in a decade or so make our national side something to be - well, not proud of exactly, but less ashamed of, maybe.
Perhaps unfortunately, that didn't happen. We're almost certainly going to get a result against Croatia, the usual Ing-ger-lund bandwagon will start trundling in to gear, and come next summer the tabloid press will have the sheer brass balls to act surprised when a witless England scrape through the group stage following two draws and a 1-0 win and then limp feebly out on penalties in the quarters. McClaren will get the sack and the whole sorry saga will begin again.
I'm wandering off-topic, though, riding my hobby-horse over to my personal dislike of the useless FA, the preening, self-obsessed England squad and the dismally underqualified Steve McClaren. The point is that, in the absence of serious, long-term vaccines against this English disease - things like serious youth skills coaching and big-money investment in the game's grassroots - short-term, stopgap, expediency measures must be found. And, if one symptom of the English disease is what coaches term "the diagonal ball into the box" and the rest of us call "the aimless hoof forward", then surely an excellent stopgap measure would be to find a striker who is big enough to get on the end of those hoofs, and skilful enough to hold up the ball when he does. Remind you of anyone?
Peter Crouch was born with several disadvantages as a footballer. For a start, he looks nothing like one. If anything he looks like a deckchair that someone half-unfolded on Crosby beach before the rains started and everyone ran indoors. It doesn't help that his shirt sleeves are always too short; it makes him look like he's wearing hand-me-downs. Second, he's far too articulate and thoughtful, often using compound sentences, subordinate clauses and other such devilries that I'm sure his media coach disapproves of, and only occasionally muttering the phrase "One hundred and ten percent". Third - as has been pointed out many times - he's not very good at heading the ball. He can cushion it for a knock-down, but he is borderline incapable of doing the solid, Les Ferdinand-style, winch-your-neck-back-and-thump-it striker's header. This doesn't much matter when you're five foot nine; when you have to have specially-made beds, it does.
Nevertheless, a footballer, and a classy one, is what he is. He might only score against the little teams, but England have traditionally made heavy weather against the little teams. Liverpool, likewise, are in real danger of falling away from the title race, not because they can't compete against the top sides, but because they draw 0-0 at home to Birmingham. If Peter Crouch is a flat-track bully, then every team should have one.
*Incidentally, I have a feeling I might be going a bit mad. During the Besiktas game, did anyone else hear David Pleat call the hat-trick hero "Benanoon" for the entire match? You'd think someone would have pointed it out after the ninth or tenth time, but no. I'm pretty sure Andriy Voronin and the Turkish side's centre-half Torroman merged into a single entity known as "Toronin" as well. I've been working nights a lot lately, though, so I may have dreamt it.
