England's cavalry sound the charge

Yet it was the manner in which Michael Owen and Emile Heskey went about their deadly business at the apex of a team balanced between the warrior virtues of old and a step in the direction of football's new technology which mattered most.

The result was damnably important — nothing new there — but England were also playing for something above and beyond the points at Wembley.

This was a national team in search of a philosophy for playing championship football, an ethos which has blown hot and cold since the lone — make that lonely — World Cup glory of '66. Up-boys-and-at-em or get-itdown- and-play-em?

The debate was rekindled by Saturday's traditional British battering of Israel. Then the flames were fanned by four days of internalising among Steve McClaren and his privy counsellors about the best way to solve the Hiddink conundrum.

The manager's No 2, Terry Venables, reopened the files on how his England of Euro 96 took Dutch Guus to the tactical cleaners.

Captain John Terry sounded a clarion call for barnstorming Hiddink's Russian labyrinth.Given that this was the second of two must-win Euro 2008 qualifiers, it is likely that the majority of supporters favoured a return to characteristically English high-tempo, high-ball, high- octane football.

Get to Austria and Switzerland first, worry later about how to approach next summer.

Yet that has been a root cause of England's belly flops in major tournament finals for the past 40 years.

Putting on the warpaint and getting in opponents' faces can unnerve lesser teams but when it comes to the World Cup or European Championship elite, the English too often find themselves galloping into an ambush.

Like it or not there is an element of chess about big-time football and Hiddink — given his litany of club success in Holland followed by World Cup semifinals with Holland and South Korea as well as leading his Australians to Germany 2006 — has to be considered one of the game's grand masters.

The best solution for England is to find an equilibrium between inspiration and intelligence, passion and patience, old and new.

Call it speed chess, that elusive amalgam between the natural strengths of the English footballer and the high-tech game of the Europeans and South Americans.

Emile Heskey meets Steven Gerrard halfway. Or, in the case of the imperative first goal, battleship Terry meets Gareth Barry's cross and Michael Owen keeps his head while Russians all around him were losing theirs.

The opening cavalry charge took the credit for the early breakthrough.

Yet it was allied to planning which pushed Shaun Wright-Phillips forward from the extreme right of midfield and mostly nudged Heskey a little wider to Owen's left than usual, which was a modification of the way Teddy Sheringham angled off Alan Shearer in their Twin Towers Wembley demolition of Hiddink's Holland 11 years ago.

Thus the back-three defence which is a staple of the Hiddink coaching manual was stretched to the point of calling for reinforcements and the Russian were tilted out of balance.

The longer Russia stayed behind on the goal count the more seriously Hiddink had to ponder a Plan B to cope with England's variation on 4-3-3.

The pressure on the old fox became all the heavier when Heskey not only headed down but drew three defenders away, leaving Owen unmarked to plunder his second... and to double personally the number of goals previously conceded by the Russians in this group.

Hiddink was staring down the barrel of one of the few blemishes on his club-and-country coaching career, the glaring absence of a single win over any English team.

When he made his change shortly before half-time he gambled by replacing defensive midfielder Igor Semshov with flying forward Vladimir Bystrov. Call it Russian roulette.