It’s too easy to ‘big up’ England before World Cup
There are certain inevitabilities about English football during the run-up to a big international tournament.
Number one is that the FA will bring out a new kit and that people will claim the price is an absolute scandal.
Number two is England fans will travel abroad, create trouble and get arrested.
And number three is that a decent performance will be hailed as a “turning point,” a “new dawn” or a sign that “this team might just surprise people” when they get to the World Cup.
Yes, we’ve been here before — before every tournament in living memory, in fact.
We can address the rip-off shirts by refusing to buy them and given the current situation it’s very unlikely that even the most stupid of England fans will repeat their Amsterdam behaviour in Russia in June.
“Bigging up” the team after a few adequate results is a natural reaction when there has been little reason for optimism over the last few years.
And what we saw from Gareth Southgate’s team against Holland on Friday evening was admittedly quietly impressive.
The formation worked. The personnel worked. There was pace and intensity about the attitude. The defence was solid. Game management improved.
Added to clean sheets in friendlies against Brazil and Germany and you can understand the temptation to believe that England should at least qualify comfortably from a group that includes Tunisia and Panama.
In fact, let’s go further. Reproduce the same level of performance in every fixture in Russia and England could reach the quarter-finals, maybe even the semis.
See what I mean? It’s easy to get carried away when you’ve had so many disappointments.
But England have always been able to win friendlies. They’ve always been able to breeze through qualifiers.
They’ve just never been able to cope with tournaments staged anywhere other than in England!
In World Cups and European Championships played abroad, they’ve won just 27 of 82 matches.
Successive generations of England players haven’t coped with the pressures of foreign tournaments, though in the last few the fear of failure has been even more crippling than ever.
Southgate has done a very commendable job, particularly in encouraging the squad to play out from the back and be comfortable on the ball.
But, until he gets to Russia, we won’t have a clue if Southgate is the man to sort out the apparently ingrained negative mindset.
It’s more important than whether he plays a back three or who the captain is.
Last year, the Under-20s won their World Cup in South Korea and the Under-17s won theirs in India, proving that there’s nothing in the English mentality that precludes success in tournaments abroad.
And success this time would be not coming home in disgrace, so the bar isn’t set particularly high.