Can England really take the next big step?
Gareth Southgate insists he’s learned from 2018 and this team will thrive when the pressure is on
IN THE immediate aftermath of that heart-breaking, midsummer’s evening in Moscow, shortly after his wife Alison had held him in her arms in a long, healing embrace in a near-empty Luzhniki Stadium, Gareth Southgate began turning the World Cup semi-final defeat by Croatia over in his mind.
In the next few days, at England’s idyllic base in Repino on the Baltic coast near St Petersburg, Southgate would take the painful but necessary step of reviewing the recording of the 2-1 extra-time defeat. And his initial sense, according to one who spoke to him, was that he had got the big calls right and there wasn’t a lot he could have done to prevent the semi-final exit.
Probably he was far too raw to acknowledge mistakes but England had been 22 minutes away from a World Cup final and had been playing pretty well in the first half. If they hadn’t quite chucked it away, they certainly invited Croatia to play to their strengths and England’s weaknesses.
Luka Modric gathered most attention in the immediate aftermath for saying that the perceived arrogance of ‘Football’s Coming Home’ had inspired Croatia. But the most cutting line came from full-back Sime Vrsaljko. ‘The allround perception was that this is a new-look England who have changed their ways of punting long balls upfield, but when we pressed them it turned out they hadn’t,’ said Vrsaljko.
Harsh, maybe, but entirely fair. Jordan Henderson, John Stones and Harry Maguire were all guilty. As Croatia’s wingers pinned back England’s wing-backs and Southgate’s team became a back five with huge gaps in midfield, they panicked, forgot their passing and reverted to national stereotype. So why hadn’t Southgate been able to spot as much and change the game?
The question will be posed again this afternoon at Wembley. Of course, England have changed since then and have demonstrably improved in several areas since 2018. There are a clutch of young, coltish midfielders who have grown up idolising Modric rather than David Batty.
England can move the ball with the best of them. But Croatia will again be the opponents and
‘Football’s Coming
Home’ will be ringing in Modric’s ears louder than ever.
England may have improved but has Southgate? He does know that he got it wrong against Croatia in Russia. By August 2018, he had taken stock and
was able to
concede he had made mistakes. ‘There was a lot going on in that game, in terms of changes you might have made,’ he said. ‘We had focused on how to adapt to a system of play across seven or eight games but we hadn’t faced all the tactical challenges that sysformations
JENAS’S STARTING XI
DEFENCE: Jordan Pickford’s experience is key and he’s still the best keeper with his feet, which is so important to how England play. Kyle Walker is the best right-back in the Premier League and his experience against Perisic is vital. Tyrone Mings is still learning but he gives us balance and I think he’ll grow in this tournament, while Luke Shaw is solid on the left. MIDFIELD: England’s biggest concern. I want to see Declan Rice as the only sitting midfielder. This is what Croatia do. Brozovic sits, tem might have to deal with and we were conscious that without the ball there were spaces where we were a bit vulnerable.
‘Our biggest issue was not keeping the ball. It’s chicken and egg. You can talk about you might change the system slightly to plug the gaps without the ball but fundamentally we have to keep the ball better under pressure. It was while Modric goes where he wants. I want to see Rice dictating play with Mason Mount and Jude Bellingham either side. Bellingham is not someone Croatia will like to face. He can get in behind you. almost as if, because we were ahead, we went a bit safer. And I think that’s understandable, in that when you’re trying to ingrain habits and a philosophy of play, under pressure people might revert back to what they’ve done.
‘Of course you sit there as a coaching team and go through all of that and reflect . . . without the ball our wing-backs stopped getting out quickly enough, so we ended up with a back five rather than a three.’
Therein lies the tale of this tournament. ‘Gareth is a different leader to eight years ago,’ his assistant Steve Holland said last week in The Mail on Sunday. ‘He’s more comfortable in certain areas now.’ Holland knows him best professionally, having worked alongside him with the Under-21s since 2013.
And he is always evolving. One key lesson from Russia was the management of game time. Holland indicated that they would be more frugal with Harry Kane’s playing minutes. Kane looked exhausted against Croatia, his contribution to a tournament, in which he won the Golden Ball, peaked early and faded as bigger tests came. This is an area in which Bryce Cavanagh, head of
Mount has Champions League experience, he’s adaptable, he can create but he will also press and win the ball back.
ATTACK: Mine will be different from Gareth’s. I want to get Jack Grealish, Harry Kane and Phil Foden in and get them flowing. I understand that Gareth might feel he needs runners as Grealish and Foden like to come towards the midfielders. Even Harry Kane likes to drop deep these days.
I want my full-backs to be the ones getting high and wide at pace. Then we can create overloads in the midfield areas. We need a player who can soak up all the pressure and deliver. Grealish is the one to do that.
performance at the FA, and Ben Rosenblatt, the lead men’s physical performance coach, will have been working on with Holland.
But it’s much more than just Operation Save Harry. Tactically, Southgate has to show that he has the ability to adjust quickly in a game. He partially redeemed himself with victory over Croatia in the Nations League in 2018 and, the tactical peak of his reign so far, the 3-2 win over Spain in Seville in October 2018.
England play with much more control now, more established wide players, which ought to be able to stretch Croatia more than before and prevent their wingers, Ivan Perisic and Ante Rebic, from pinning England back again. Even if England do play a back three, it won’t be the 3-5-2 that was so exposed in 2018. It’s hard to imagine Declan Rice and Mason Mount playing long balls unless it’s those
precise passes allowing Phil Foden and Raheem Sterling to run into space.
So Southgate has changed but it’s hard to be certain how much. It took Olympic levels of self-righteousness to get exasperated with a 0-0 draw against a decent Danish side back in September, given that everyone was fielding half-fit players living in surreal Covid bubbles and playing behind closed doors. It was hardly representative of normal international football.
Equally, it was difficult to get over-excited about a 3-0 win over a poor Republic of Ireland in November. UEFA Nations League matches and friendlies are a mere shadow of what real tournament football is. Never has that been more true than this year.
A tournament offers more scope to assess whether Southgate and Holland will be able to cut it when the pressure is truly on. And that pressure is on from the off. The 2.0 remodelled version of the midfield that made England look like chumps in 2018 is back. Modric remains the lead and, while Ivan Rakitic has retired from international football, Chelsea’s Mateo Kovacic is an intelligent replacement. Marcelo Brozovic, who won Serie A with Inter, remains and will complete the triumvirate. They could easily make England look foolish again.
Unless England can do what Southgate always insists he wants them to do, which is press the ball with energy and pass the ball with incision. Unless they can use the speed and intelligence of Sterling and the impishness of Foden to unleash the predatory instincts of Kane. Unless Southgate has improved. If he has, England will probably win this afternoon and they could make a serious dent on this tournament. If not, we may be back to familiar laments.