Modern team defies fogeys

“WE are a team that, with our diversity and our youth, represent modern England.”

Gareth Southgate is right and that representation will only grow more accurate as the players from the age-group squads come through.

Go to St George’s Park when the junior teams are in residence and you cannot fail to notice the two things Southgate talks of.

Yet the amount of work the football authorities and the government still have to do in attracting more diversity and youth to the English game, on so many levels, has once again been seen in the stands.

At the Volgograd Stadium, at the Nizhny Novgorod Stadium, at the Kaliningrad Stadium, my guess is that, if the number of black England followers exceeded the number of black England players, it was not by many.

At home, the England team attracts a more diverse support, but not away from home.

That is one of the issues that needs addressing.

Others include the lack of diversity in the executive roles at all of English football’s governing bodies and, of course, the lack of BAME coaches at professional level.

Southgate (above) is spot-on.

This team does represent modern England… but there is so much else about the game that still doesn’t.

RANDOM irritations. When did a holding midfielder become a single pivot?

Would Graham Taylor have got less stick if he had requested ‘quick transition’ rather than wondering why Carlton could not knock it?

Football stays the same, coaches just find different ways to describe it.