It is a part of following English football to feel, in among the absorbing passions, a sense also of something vital missing, a curtain-twitching envy for the alternative riches of abroad. This craving is often confined to simple things like an English goalkeeper who doesn't appear to be continually on the verge of bursting into tears, or to be unable to complete the simplest involvement in the game without pointing and shouting wildly like a man attempting to stop a municipal rubbish truck reversing into his greenhouse. Most common is the unanswered yearning for a genuine midfield fantasista, some big-haired visionary with a sense of perpetual menace in his gambolling size fours.
Personally I have always had a longing for something else: the kind of fluid, physically prodigious defender usually referred to as "a Rolls-Royce player". The Rolls-Royce is the rarest of species but his presence always seems to mark an apex in any nation's development, football's equivalent of the magnificent subterranean drainage system of ancient Rome, or the first striding appearance of David Hasselhoff across the ruins of the Berlin Wall.
So far this season it has seemed as though in Phil Jones, Manchester United's quietly alluring utility defender, we may have a genuine Rolls-Royce contender on our hands. That is, until Jones turned in one slipshod performance against Basel in midweek, a wobble that has led to a familiar sense of chagrin, of downgrading, a call for a scaling back of ambition.
This is how it goes for the junior Rolls-Royce, who is only ever one careless performance the right side of the fanny merchant and the trench-deserter. For this reason the first quality the Rolls-Royce player requires is effortless physical supremacy. He must glide in predatory fashion, propelled, shark-like, by his own flaring neck muscles. He must never weaken or tremble but must instead out-wrestle the wrestlers. There are, however, limits: in no circumstances must he wear a heroic white-conical bandage on his head.
Recently Frank Lampard was described as "a Rolls-Royce midfielder", but this is a category mistake as a Rolls-Royce can only ever really be a central defender, albeit one who seems to move in a different kind of gravity, to glide in his own unconventional patterns. These are not wild dashes forward. At the 1998 World Cup Sol Campbell memorably crash-tackled his way 30 metres upfield, arm-wrestled past the Argentina midfield and shinned a flailing shot narrowly off target, in what was almost a kind of caveman-Maradona moment. This was not the action of a Rolls-Royce, however, more a runaway cartoon pick-up truck or a milk float falling down a hill.
Instead the Rolls-Royce will often go unnoticed. He may make a couple of interceptions. There may be a surge forward just after half-time. But really his strength is strength in reserve. Unsurprisingly there haven't been many of these understated colossi: Frank Rijkaard was a Rolls-Royce. Matthias Sammer, the forgotten giant of the 1990s, was definitively Rolls-Royce.
I think we can say now that Rio Ferdinand is not really a Rolls-Royce, but is instead a very good defender with a sense of muscular grace. Steven Gerrard might have been a Rolls-Royce in a parallel universe: he has the surge and the skills and his defensive anchor role in the 5-1 defeat of Germany in Munich was an understated masterclass. But he is too frazzled and rushed, forever leaping out of his skin like a traumatised cat.
Among other Premier League pretenders David Luiz springs to mind but again the waters are muddied. Is he a Rolls-Royce? Or the kind of parping executive jalopy that comes floundering in from the wings, performs a pirouette and then makes its doors fall off so a clown can get out?
As David Luiz and Jones have found, there is inbuilt mistrust of the Rolls-Royce in England that almost feels like a kind of status anxiety. The Rolls-Royce player appears disarmingly frictionless, unfazed by positional boundaries. Within the rigid specialism, the furious literalism of English football, this frankly just isn't going to do, and the Rolls-Royce player carries a troubling edge of positional anarchy, a sense that before long he may start incorrectly addressing the under-gardener or asking the Queen what time it is.
Really, though, it is just a textural thing. The Rolls-Royce needs the right climate to flourish, football without sudden twitches or spasms, where the ball is treated like a soap bubble or an ostrich egg or a vital transplant organ. This is far from the norm at many levels of English football, where the ball is more likely to be treated as an obscure source of shame or even danger, to be frantically handed on before its flimsy glass frontage is cracked and a strain of deadly Ebola virus escapes.
Revolution comes from within, of course, and English football would be all the richer if the odd homegrown Rolls-Royce could be allowed to bloom. Surely we can forgive Jones – who seems physically there and who has bravery and poise – his minor transgressions, as we may forgive the flaws of a junior wing-jinker or a tyro goal-hanger. There is no shortage of stoppers and bruisers. But Jones is a rare model and he should be allowed to let his engines thrum without fear.
