BROTHERSGROUP

Butcher hopes team spirit can help Three Lions avoid early flight home

TERRY BUTCHER believes the secret to England’s success will be their dressing-room bond - and staying off the departures board.

The England legend revealed how Bobby Robson used a flip chart during Italia 90 showing the flights home and challenged the players to make sure they were not on an early one.

Camaraderie carried them to the semi-finals and Butcher believes there is a similarity to Gareth Southgate’s side, which can take them far.

Butcher admits there are better players and squads in Russia, but rates togetherness and improving through the tournament as key.

He said: “I think we’ll get out of the group. I don’t think we’ll lose to an Iceland this time, and it’s about being the best we can be. We weren’t great in 1990 in the early stages, but got better all the way to the semi-final.

“It’s not about peaking too soon, it’s about getting to know each other, forming a bond. Some of the players have suffered disappointments and that would drive me as a player to say that’s not going to happen again.

“They need to be saying: ‘We’re not coming home early’.

“Bobby used to love a flip chart, he’d put up the departure times on it and say, ‘Make sure we’re on the last flight home’. Bobby was like that. He’d tick them off, that was an incentive. Coming home after the group stage in 2014 was a disaster, coming home after the Euros, and Iceland, in 2016 was an even bigger disaster.

“We have to make sure that doesn’t happen again. I’m quite comfortable with the squad, there’s good players in there.

“The pool of players Gareth has is nothing compared to back in the days when Bobby could choose anyone from the whole of the old First Division. Basically, apart from Wales, Scotland and the Irish players, it was all English, an English league with English managers. A good league, too.

“But I still think the pool of players he has is good. Yeah, he’d like better keepers, better centre-halves and yet going forward we’re not bad.

“But if you look at it we’re not as good as Brazil, Germany and Spain.”

Southgate has tried to set up a tight-knit group and the players are shut off in a quiet hotel in a forest in Repino. Butcher says the respect for the manager is vital.

He said: “Bobby came through it so well. You’re cocooned away in your hotel. We had two in a room, we used to share rooms, no ipads, no internet and five phones. We had Monopoly and Peter Beardsley, that’s all we had.

“The squad was really tight, we got on really well. Players wanted to do it for him, they fought for him. They knew what to do, it was part of the system. Anybody could sit with anybody at the dinner table, anybody could play with anyone.”