England chasing best start ever

LONDON // After a 5-1 victory and maximum points from their opening three 2010 World Cup qualifying games, England travel to Belarus happily perched at the top of Group Six. A win on Wednesday would give England their best ever start to a World Cup qualifying campaign, yet all the talk around the team today seems to be focused on tactical problems and the sound of England fans booing leftback Ashley Cole.

England hope their first ever game against Belarus will end with Fabio Capello's team moving five points ahead of their biggest Group Six rivals, Ukraine and Croatia. With only the group winners sure to advance to the tournament in South Africa, Capello knows that would be a big lead at this stage even though Ukraine will still have a game in hand and still have England to play twice. The possible absence of Belarus' top player, Alexander Hleb, who is struggling with an ankle injury, will certainly aid England's hopes of obtaining maximum points in Minsk.

But despite scoring nine goals in their last two group games against Croatia and Kazakhstan, England still seem to be struggling in a number of areas ? most notably on the left side of midfield and the age-old problem of trying to get star midfielders Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard to replicate their club form on the international stage. The Liverpool captain Gerrard, who again failed to shine in the heart of England's midfield against Kazakhstan alongside Lampard, acknowledged that those England fans who jeered the first half performance had every right to do so.

"You've got to live with that as a player," Gerrard said at a press conference. "There are big expectations on this team. We are England. We expect to be successful and to have a good team that's playing well so, when it doesn't always click, you expect it (criticism). "But, in the end, we got there on Saturday, a 5-1 win, and when you look at the bigger picture we are top of the group with three wins and confident that we can get the fourth on Wednesday."

England go into the game against Belarus without captain John Terry, who also missed the Kazakhstan game with a lingering back injury, and Ashley Cole, who picked up a hamstring injury at Wembley. While Rio Ferdinand will again captain the team, Cole will at least have the heat taken off him after his back-pass blunder at Wembley that earned Kazakhstan an unexpected goal. The Italian tactician Capello is likely to avoid the 4-3-3 formation that started and failed against Kazakhstan and revert to the tried 4-4-2 favoured by most England players.

That could also mean Gerrard moving away from the attacking central midfield role he prefers and pushed onto the left ? a position he openly admits he dislikes. "I think this manager is going to keep changing personnel and tactics and formations before and during games so I don't think it is always going to be me and Frank in the middle," Gerrard said. Whatever the formation, England should have enough to beat Belarus, especially if the Barcelona midfielder Hleb, formerly with Arsenal, misses the game, as expected.

"If Alexander Hleb doesn't play because of injury, then the Belarus team will lose its Maradona, Beckenbauer and Pele," Belarus' German coach Bernd Stange said. "We lack stability, and we don't have that many classy players." But Stange pointed out that Belarusian football is on the rise: "The progress in Belarusian football is obvious. "In a year the team has climbed 35 places in the Fifa ranking, and BATE (Borisov) is playing in the Champions League. Is that luck? No, it is the result of hard work."

Minsk police expect some 3,000 England fans for Wednesday's match at the 40,000-capacity Dynamo stadium and there will be tight security for the first meeting of the two teams with police escorting groups of England fans wherever they go. Some 2,000 Interior Ministry troops will be deployed in and around the stadium for the game. *AP