Southgate’s ability to make multiple talented players play painfully boring football is so bad it’s almost a gift. A part of me would be interested to see what he’d do with Messi.
Last night’s game was a reminder of how difficult it is to prepare an international team for tournament football. There are so many issues to resolve. It’s probably down to luck more than anything if a team is able perform collectively at its best when it matters in June/July after a long domestic season. Whoever starts the first game, it is likely that the XI will have played few, if any, minutes together as a team. Some players are returning from injury (Saka, Stones, Shaw etc) and need games, whereas others probably need rest. Bellingham hasn’t even joined the squad yet. Yesterday showed that although England have a wealth of individual talent in the front six, they are not familiar with playing together and might have to play different roles/positions than the ones they play for the club sides. A player like Foden has much greater responsibility for England without Bernardo Silva, Rodri and de Bruyne around him doing the work they do in City’s midfield. He didn’t look comfortable handling that last night. The team is far from settled in terms of selection, what roles/positions that play and what their style of play is. And the makeshift defence looks to be a weak link. I wouldn’t fancy its chances of containing France or Portugal in a big game.
Tournament football is usually boring for the reasons you cite, It favours the Portugese style of defensive football. Settled teams will always play better but the set up of the seasons does not favour that, instead of all these International breaks which add nothing, stop them. Finish the season earlier and let the national team play together for 4 or 5 games before the tournament begins. Decide on your players and stick with them so they get a chance. Before when most English clubs played mostly English players we had teams representing England with sometimes 7 players from Liverpool or United quickly establishing a team understanding we can't do that anymore.
Southgate forcing in Palmer and Mainoo hasn’t helped imo. He got slagged off for being loyal to the likes of Henderson, Rashford and Kalvin Phillips. Dropped them and now struggling to find the right midfield combination. Individually England have good players (so do 4-5 other nations) but collectively they look a mess.
One thing I recall from the England teams of the 80s is they often had 3-4 starting XI players in defence/MF who were actually captains of their club teams. Which IMHO is quite important when you have a number of kids in the team (keeping them focused and disciplined etc) .
They’re not captains but you’ve got experienced heads in there like Pickford, Walker, Rice & Kane who should be able to help with that side of it (if needed)
I think we saw Kane giving what looked like instructions before tha Iceland game. Not a good example of a game I know
Walker captains City, Rice was captain of his team before he moved to that lot, Kane has been captain of England for yonks and would be captain of Spurs most likely if he’d stayed. Trippier basically captains Newcastle because Lascalles rarely plays. There’s no shortage of leadership on this team. The change RBDB describes is more because the PL itself has become more international and the stereotype of leadership has changed. I still think there was 8 English captains in the PL last season though, and more in leadership roles when you consider VCs and other players who frequently wear the armband (Gallagher for example).
The problem with that England team was lack of balance. It's all very well having a wealth of attacking talent, but you can't put it all in the same team. Just love the pundits who always ask themselves questions like 'should X player be in the team', and for all the questions like this, the follow-up question is never asked 'if X player is in the team then what player is *not* in the team'. Because listening to the pundits you either end up with a 15 man team, or a team full of flair players that would be cut to pieces by a decent team. And *team* is the actual point. Have we learned nothing about shoehorning certain players in simply because they score a lot or have great attacking skills? 11 attackers does not a team make. And for all the criticism of the boring teams Southgate put out in previous competitions they were arguably better balanced than the one against Iceland. And with regard to balance in the midfield, most people's thoughts don't seem to get past 'well we've got Rice in there'. So for me Gallagher has to play. Not because he's the "best player", but he may be the best at helping to balance the team. And he is probably the best pressing player, which is what we need more than another flair player.
I made a similar point the other day. The actual answer to the age-old "Lampard or Gerrard?" question was in fact "Michael Carrick". But not a single pundit ever dared suggest it, so we ended up with both in the team, Scholes playing at left wing, and the real solution sitting on the bench.
