‘My stars don’t know how good they could be’
CAPS, experience, a decent goalkeeper and strength in numbers. But Gareth Southgate has had just about enough of hearing what his World Cup squad has not got.
While he does his best as a coach to paper over those cracks, the thing that excites him most about leading England to Russia amid the lowest expectations there have ever been is that even the players themselves do not seem to appreciate they might just be a little bit better than everybody thinks.
“What’s lacking would be obvious to everybody really,” Southgate said after naming the third-youngest squad in England history.
“They are things that have been raised and talked about so I’m back to my responsibilities as a coach to make the most of the strengths of the players I’ve got and hide potential weaknesses through systems or the tactics of the team.
“But what gives me optimism? I see such exciting players coming through and some of them, I don’t think they know how good they might be.”
As seems to be increasingly the case, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, right, is Southgate’s go-to example for his model of England’s next generation of football force.
“I’m looking at Ruben a couple of weeks ago at Crystal Palace,” he says. “He’s having a huge impact on the game and there’s still more to come.
“He’s 6ft 4ins, he’s technically outstanding, he can beat players, he can dribble past players, he can retain the ball, he can slide passes. I’m thinking, ‘Go on, go again!’ He just needs to keep progressing and he needs time to do that.
“That applies to so many of them because of the point they’re at. That’s the beauty of the age they’re at. OK, we know what they don’t have, but what’s just around the corner for them? And the ones just beneath them as well. That’s what really excites me.”
The important thing for Southgate is to provide the right environment for these young players to grow up in properly. That, to his mind, means treating his kids like adults.
Helping him in Russia will be Pippa Grange, the FA’s head of people and team development, an expert tasked with improving the “psychological resilience” of the squad. Because Southgate does not want his players to be too nice to each other, either.
“It is one of the things that makes a winning team,” he said. “They need to get on well but they have not to be afraid of upsetting each other at times. That is the key, they have to be brave enough to have conversations that need to be had at certain times. It is down to the personality of individual players.
“We know who can cope from working with them as younger players. Can they deal with that time away? People also take the lead from the leader. So how I am around it, how relaxed I am in terms of there being opportunities to go out of the hotel, to go sightseeing, just to escape the bubble... it can’t just be 24-hour-a-day football.
“OK, they might do a couple of things criticised on the back of that but I have to be brave enough to say I am prepared for them to go into St Petersburg to sightsee or see families or whatever. “Obviously there is some trust in that which has to be respected, but you are creating an adult environment. They may be young players by World Cup standards, but I am not going to treat them like children.”
NATHANIEL CHALOBAH of Watford and Manchester City goalkeeper Angus Gunn will join up with the England squad at St George’s Park on Sunday with Southgate planning a behind-closed-doors warm-up match.
They will join the five official standby players – Tom Heaton, James Tarkowski, Lewis Cook, Jake Livermore and Adam Lallana – with a view to providing opposition to his first-choice team.