STOP THE DIVING STERLING
Southgate needs cool heads now the cheats will always get caught
Saturday morning at the Grove hotel in Hertfordshire. Gareth Southgate holds a team meeting with his England players. He discusses Var and the possibility of retrospective action at the World Cup, how replays mean players cannot get away with gamesmanship any more, even off the ball. Everything can be spotted. It is all up for review. No doubt the players nod earnestly and give every impression they are taking it in.
Saturday afternoon at Wembley, raheem Sterling is booked by referee Marco Guida for a blatant dive against Nigeria. Who’d be a manager, eh?
Southgate is a patient, pragmatic sort, so he wasn’t bouncing off the walls after the game as some might have been. He had plainly been of a mind not to pick Sterling at all, the player having reported late for England duty two weeks ago.
the furore over his gun tattoo changed that. Southgate thought if he left out one of his best players for the last match at Wembley before the World Cup, it would set the hare running again on an old story, and cause complications.
He wanted Sterling to be focused on football, the professional rather than the personal. He did not want another furore over whether the player had been punished, and for what. and he hoped the admonishment and the apology Sterling had given to the rest of the squad for his lateness was a lesson learned. If only it were that simple.
diving is so ingrained in modern football that it is going to take a lot more than one team talk to unpick these calculations of risk-reward. at Wembley, Sterling saw the opportunity to cheat a rookie goalkeeper in Francis uzoho and went to ground. Not for the first time, he wasn’t greatly convincing.
Southgate said he needed to see a replay, but the dive looked even worse slowed down. and if FIFa are serious about retrospective action at the World Cup, this is what would have happened.
In scenario one, Sterling would be booked, as he was at Wembley. In scenario two, the referee would award a penalty, before the Var informs him Sterling has dived. He reverses his decision and books Sterling. In scenario three, he waves play on, the Var informs him of the dive during a break in play — even at half-time — and he books Sterling.
there is a fairly consistent outcome here. Provided the referee and Var do their jobs correctly, there is no scenario in which England get a penalty, and no scenario in which Sterling is not booked. In the circumstances, with the rules as they now are, only fools would commit such crimes.
and Sterling is no fool, certainly not as a football player, no matter the many judgments made on his artistic streak. He is intelligent, he reads a game well, he takes up good positions — for all these reasons he has earned a place as England’s No 10, ahead of dele alli.
yet he went to ground as if by instinct, and in contravention of every warning. He went to ground because that is what forwards now do — which is why Var has been hurried into service.
So this is a test, of England’s game management and discipline. this is about players thinking, and, at tournaments, that has never been a strong point. too often, England exit because they lose control of a match. Whether this is an individual flaw (Wayne rooney against Portugal in 2006) or collective (the gung-ho second half against Germany in 2010), England lack the wit to deliver under pressure.
against Iceland in 2016, they froze again, as a group. Getting to the root of this has been top of Southgate’s to-do list and it is not greatly encouraging that one of the players on which he will most depend should suffer a mind slip so soon. this was a friendly. What if England go deep into the competition, or have failed to break down Panama with 10 minutes to go? Southgate needs cool heads, not players falling into harmful old habits.
‘We have to be vigilant in all areas of the pitch,’ he said. ‘We had a conversation for that very reason. Not that we are looking to get away with anything, but if we thought we could, that time has gone. We’re not 100 per cent sure yet whether the situation of retrospective action is a reality, but, whatever, there have been tackles in recent games that would be pulled up, that might have been yellow or even red cards. For all our players, it’s something we have to be aware of.
‘they recognise it’s going to come in. It’s a system everybody is still getting used to and how it is implemented is going to be key because if you look at any corner, for example, you could find hundreds of infringements. How that is interpreted will be really important.’
It comes back, again, to discipline. the responsibility to heed and carry out instructions, to turn up on time, too. the tattoo row overshadowed a far more serious transgression, Sterling reporting late for England duty, despite having been given an extra day away. a stricter coach — Fabio Capello, for instance — might have told him not to bother coming at all. Maybe Southgate would have, too, had he been blessed with the riches and options of some of his contemporaries.
He long ago made the decision to play Sterling behind Harry Kane. yet had the tattoo row not blown up he would almost certainly have left Sterling on the bench as a word of caution. It was the player
in Southgate, however, who decided by the end of the week that Sterling needed encouragement, more than another public reprimand.
‘i felt there’s a fine line,’ he said. ‘i have to have some consistency in how i deal with the group, so of course i had a conversation with him around what our expectations are.
‘But equally, i knew if i left him out after everything that has happened it’s a huge story and i wanted him to play, to get on with his football and get back into it as quickly as possible. You can’t have black and white rules. We try to manage the group the best way possible. it is important the players feel protected, but we also need discipline in the way we work. We need that balance.
‘i have been a player and i know when things get sloppy, standards drop, and we have to make sure they do not drop.
‘i don’t think we are quite at that stage where the players are ready to self-police.
‘in an ideal world you have experienced senior men who take control of situations, but always with the manager calling the shots. i don’t think they are ready for total ownership because of their age and their experience, but it is also wrong not to give them some responsibility because without it, how will they grow and improve?
‘You have to accept at times there will be mistakes. i know when to step in to set the tone and i know each player is slightly different. But they will react off the leader and that leader has to be strong.’
The game? England were at their best when nigeria were not and their half-time change to three at the back, mirroring England’s tactics, seemed to flummox Southgate’s men.
individuals impressed, not least Jordan Pickford, Kieran Trippier and gary Cahill, while Ruben loftus-Cheek and fabian Delph are surely worth a longer look against Costa Rica on Thursday.
Then the real stuff starts, first against Tunisia in Volgograd. Southgate will hope they are all retaining information more successfully by then.