MATT LAWTON
Play like Man Utd ? Three Lions look like Southampton!
GARETH Southgate responded to birthday wishes yesterday with a joke. ‘No cake but no Yaya Toure either,’ he said with a smile before quickly apologising to a Manchester City midfielder who reportedly wanted more of a fuss made when he turned 31 a few years ago.
Yesterday England’s manager was actually in no real mood to celebrate. It was his 47th birthday, after all. But he was also keen to focus more on what is a vastly important, potentially difficult World Cup qualifier for a team even he admits are still some way short of what he is striving to create.
Gordon Strachan might have likened England to ‘Manchester United, Chelsea and Juventus’ over the weekend but Southgate would disagree. He watched Spain annihilate Italy on Saturday night and conceded that his side were nowhere near as good as the 2010 World Cup winners.
He also said it would be unfair to expect him to take this young England squad and turn them into serious contenders after less than a year in charge.
as they demonstrated in Malta on Friday night, England are pretty damn ordinary at the moment. They have been for some time, showing little if any progress since that woefully premature exit from the last World Cup, and the crushing defeat by Iceland they suffered two years later.
Contrary to what Strachan thinks, they are nothing like as competent as Chelsea or Manchester United and these days only the deluded would expect them to be. Everton or Southampton would be a fairer comparison; the kind of team that have some promising young players and the potential to be very good, but generally sit a significant level below the very best.
at Tottenham’s training ground, Southgate found himself trying to manage expectations in tandem with managing his team, mainly in response to those England supporters clearly getting sick of mediocre performances on the international stage.
This, however, is a delicate balancing act for Southgate when an honest assessment of his team’s strengths has to be married with the need to deliver at Wembley tonight against a Slovakia side who pose a proper threat. They also boast some decent players, Napoli’s Marek Hamsik among them, and demonstrated their quality when they beat Germany only last year, albeit in a Euro 2016 warm-up game. More relevant is the fact that they sit just two points behind England in Group F with three games to play.
It is a year to the day that Sam allardyce, armed with a lucky coin, beat Slovakia 1-0 with a late goal from adam Lallana, but England almost seem more vulnerable this evening. Sure, it is 10 years since the national team last lost a qualifying game at Wembley. But the stakes are high tonight and they go into the game having won only four of the nine matches they have contested since Southgate succeeded allardyce.
SOUTHGATE would point to the stature of the teams they have lost to in friendlies and that Spain performance he witnessed the previous evening only highlighted the size of the task he has taken on. asked if his side could do to Italy what Spain managed on Saturday, he replied: ‘ No. How could we compare ourselves to a team who have Champions League winners throughout on a consistent basis, and have a World Cup and European Championships under their belt?
‘We’re a work in progress. We have some players like Phil (Jones) who have won trophies, but a lot who have won none. We have nowhere near the number of caps. We have exciting young players who can be really good going forward, but will have to go through some of the hardships those Spaniards went through to get where they are.
‘Look at Real Madrid and Barcelona — in the last four of the Champions League every year. None of our clubs have appeared in the last four of the Champions League for a long, long time, Chelsea aside.’
actually, Manchester City reached the semi-finals in 2016, but the point stands.
Southgate was then asked how long it might take to raise the standards of the national team to the required level, and again he
was cautious. ‘I don’t know how quickly we can develop that,’ he said. ‘Maybe very quickly. The players are willing to learn and take ideas on board. But I go back to what I said a few months ago: if we’re looking for some kind of messiah to change things, I don’t think that’s realistic.’
So he’s not the messiah, and nor does he feel like a naughty boy for the criticism he and his team have received since that laboured display in Malta.
Instead he recognises that with england it simply comes with the territory. ‘It’s the same narrative I heard when I was playing,’ he said.
With a World Cup only nine months away, progress nevertheless needs to be made.
‘My job is to build this team,’ he said. ‘The next step is to qualify, to develop and build the team, bring new young players into the fold. Any number of objectives.
‘I could sit here saying quarterfinal, semi-final, fifth in the world, but it’s irrelevant. We have to back it up with actions.’
Starting with a more convincing performance this evening.