SOUTHGATE HAILS RODGERS’ ‘BRILLIANT’ HANDLING OF EVENTS
ENGLAND boss Gareth Southgate praised Brendan Rodgers’ “brilliant” handling of this week’s events at Leicester City as he warned that off-field indiscipline will not be tolerated ahead of this summer’s European Championships.
Southgate was at the London Stadium on Sunday to watch City’s 3-2 defeat to West Ham, with James Maddison, Ayoze Perez, and Hamza Choudhury all excluded from the squad by Rodgers after they breached Covid-19 protocols by attending a party at Perez’s house.
The incident could damage Maddison’s hopes of making this summer’s Euros squad, given they were already dwindling after the one-cap midfielder missed last month’s internationals through injury.
Maddison is not completely out of the picture, as the likes of Kyle Walker, Ben Chilwell, Tammy Abraham, Jadon Sancho, Phil Foden, and Mason Greenwood have all broken coronavirus rules over the past year and have remained in favour.
However, Southgate is frustrated that previous incidents may have previously hampered England’s chances and so is keen to avoid more off-field distractions come the summer.
The Three Lions manager did not discuss Maddison specifically, only to praise how City dealt with the matter.
“Coming into the summer we’ve got to make sure we arrive into the camp giving ourselves the best chance to focus on football and that helps to create a calmer environment for everybody to go into the tournament,” Southgate said.
“I’m obviously very conscious that Leicester have dealt with the situation brilliantly and they’ve got a massive game on Sunday (an FA Cup semi-final v Southampton), so I don’t think I should talk about specifics.
“In the end we’ve had issues ourselves in the autumn. That’s always very difficult for coaches to deal with. It puts you in really difficult positions. I can only compare that with March where we came in with no dramas coming into the camp.
“It’s just a much better environment to prepare for football.
We were only having to make football decisions, prepare the team, talk about football topics. I think for any coaching staff and any team, when we went into the tournament in
Russia we had minimal distractions going into it.
“That’s something I talked to the players about after the autumn.
“In the autumn, discipline off the pitch and on the pitch created really the biggest issues for us and meant we didn’t get to the semi-finals of the
Nations League that we were desperate to be in.
“It still annoys me when I look at that line-up: Italy, Spain, Belgium, France.
“It’s a brilliant line-up and games you want to be involved in. One of the key areas was that we didn’t have availability of players at certain times for on and off the field misdemeanours.”
Maddison is enjoying his most productive City season but faces keen competition from the likes of Foden, Mason Mount, Jesse Lingard, and Jack Grealish to earn a place in the Euros line-up.
Harvey Barnes also has a chance of making the side if he recovers from injury in time to get a good run of games going, with Sancho, Raheem Sterling, Marcus Rashford, and Bukayo Saka among his rivals for a
spot out wide.