New manager, same old problems
“Welcome to the Impossible Job,” said Jason Burt in The Daily Telegraph. On Sunday, Sam Allardyce became the ninth successive England manager to get off to a winning start. Yet the victory – 1-0 over Slovakia in a World Cup qualifier – was hardly resounding. Despite playing against a ten-man team for the final 30 minutes, England couldn’t score until the fifth minute of injury time. This was no “new dawn”: eight members of the first XI had lined up against Iceland in June, and their “unconvincing and ponderous” football on Sunday was all too familiar. England deserved to win, “just about”, but there can be no doubt that Allardyce faces an enormous challenge.
First of all, he must confront a familiar conundrum, said Michael Cox in The Guardian: what to do with Wayne Rooney. Against Slovakia, the captain played in his preferred role at international level, as part of a central-midfield trio. For Manchester United, José Mourinho insists Rooney plays as a striker; but for England, the player appears to have free rein. “I can’t stop Wayne playing there,” Allardyce said this week, even though he’s the one who picks the team. On the evidence of the last year, however, it’s not Rooney whom the team should be built around, but Adam Lallana, who scored England’s goal on Sunday. England’s “brightest” player at the Euros, the Liverpool midfielder boasts an intelligence that his teammates lack.