GREAT EXPECTATIONS
After that nervy first win, Phil Neville must follow Southgate’s lead and play down England’s…
Phil Neville knows how to play it low key. You will not find him in the dressing room when his players are about to take to the field. he leaves them to it.
it is actually his boss, the FA’s director of women’s football Sue Campbell, who will sometimes enter their realm at that moment and embrace them one by one. her deft touch with them reflects 16 years of work in elite sport.
it would serve the World Cup campaign well if Neville went by on the quiet side a little more. in the interests of building selfbelief, he has been talking for some time now about how the team can win this tournament.
That bullishness, coinciding with the english game beginning to attract investment and profile at last, has built a hype which looked like a burden in the heat of the French Riviera on Sunday.
ellen White said in the aftermath of the 2-1 win over Scotland: ‘Delighted. Glad to have those 90 minutes out of the way. There’s been so much hype and expectation about this game.’
One of the keys to england’s improbable journey to last year’s men’s semi-final was the way that Gareth Southgate did away with the usual talk about english expectations. ‘We create a bubble in our country around the league because of the money,’ he said at the time. ‘ We can’t consider ourselves big players.’
it is more complicated for Neville, who must be a standard bearer for a women’s game fighting to be heard. But the very public assertion that england are ‘here to win it’, as Nikita Parris put it, builds pressure.
L’Equipe described england as one of the four favourites in an unflattering report on the Scotland game.
The United States, tournament favourites, are still way ahead of england in the development of players. Their universities have provided scholarships for thousands of young players for decades, honing femalespecific strength and conditioning work which has made the team, who open their campaign against Thailand tonight, insuperably strong. england’s elite game, by comparison, is still in its infancy. last season was the first in which the Women’s Super league was fully professional and the first in which it ran through winter. An england squad have never before headed straight into an international tournament on the back of a league campaign. The BBC’s Alex Scott said on Sunday: ‘i have questions about how tired they looked. it was a running theme.’ it was part of an appraisal which was
far more robust than is customary when players from the men’s game discuss former team-mates.
One of Neville’s priorities has been to get WSL clubs to reach FA levels of physical training in the past 16 months. ‘When Phil came in, he said to me we’ve got to help the clubs better understand what we do,’ Campbell says. ‘He will say to strength and conditioning coaches at the clubs, “Come and see what we’re doing”. And good practice is spreading.’
The one who stood out against Scotland has kept things low key. At 32, Jill Scott’s profile has not been as high, but, as Sunday’s outstanding player she had the stamina to remain England’s creative core, winning possession back at every opportunity.
‘She’s irreplaceable,’ Neville said. ‘In the first half our game plan was about Jill getting up the pitch and robbing the opposition. She can play until she’s 40. She never misses a training session. She’s built like a marathon runner. Her energy levels are frightening.’
England have travelled north to Le Havre. Neither Toni Duggan, who is carrying a thigh injury, nor Millie Bright, who injured her shoulder in Nice, trained yesterday but full back Demi Stokes is back in training and Duggan was doing gym work.
Neville will not have the benefit of Southgate’s company in the coming weeks. Southgate will be part of the travelling party for the Under 21 European Championship, which start on Sunday in Italy.
But if they were together, you imagine Southgate might tell Neville to go easy on the intensity, in public at least, and think twice about post-match team talks on the pitch, like the one he staged in Nice, in which he looked extremely uncompromising. They won a tricky opening game, didn’t they? Sometimes, less is more.