Oxlade-chamberlain deserves his chance on Euro 2020 stage

Southgate backing midfielder on return from latest injury ‘Against top sides you need players who can do both sides of the game and he fits the profile’

By the time Euro 2020 comes around, Alex Oxlade-chamberlain will have been an England international for more than eight years, and there is no denying that, over 35 caps, it has been a career defined by what he has missed as much as the games he has played.

He has been an England player longer than Harry Kane or Danny Rose, and when he first pulled on the shirt it was in the first match that Roy Hodgson took charge of the team, as well as the last in which goalkeeper Robert Green would play. It would be fair to say we are now deep in the third act of Oxlade-chamberlain’s career, from the teenage prodigy, to the frustrated Arsenal winger and now to the post-injury Liverpool central midfielder who has always fought back from adversity.

Oxlade-chamberlain (below right) was as much a certainty to start games at the 2018 World Cup when, in the 15th minute of Liverpool’s Champions League quarter-final first leg against Roma in April last year, he stepped outwards into the challenge of Aleksandar Kolarov. The injury he sustained changed his life, and cost him what might well have been a place in two Champions League finals and one World Cup squad. Only now does it feel, 19 months on, that he is back to a place with

England that can be compared with the one he left all that time ago.

These past two qualifiers have seen the pieces move once again in this 2019 England team, who go into a tournament year with the basis of a good idea. There is a goalscorer in irresistible form in Harry Kane. There are two excellent young full-backs. There is a recognised 4-3-3 formation which seems to suit Gareth Southgate’s players regardless of who has to adapt to it. And then there is Oxlade-chamberlain who emerges from the last internationals of the year having established himself again at the head of a group of midfielders competing for three places.

Were the tournament to start next month, Oxlade-chamberlain would be in the starting XI, even if he is not yet able to establish himself in a similar position with Liverpool. But as he knows only too well, the tournament comes when it does and the vicissitudes of the game decide who will play and who will be forced to watch it in their living rooms with a postsurgery leg propped up on the coffee table. No footballer can live in fear of the unknown but as Euro 2020 draws closer he is bound to wonder if fate will intervene as it did for him for Euro 2016 and the two World Cup finals either side of that, all of which he missed through injury.

The new Oxlade-chamberlain had emerged before that night at Anfield when hamstring and anterior cruciate ligament damage resulted in surgery. Jurgen Klopp signed him from Arsenal in the summer of 2017 to be an attacking midfielder capable of breaking forward and shooting as well as fulfilling defensive responsibilities. At 26, that is what Southgate is also asking him to do.

It was the defensive perspective that Southgate emphasised in Pristina when he assessed the second of Oxlade-chamberlain’s two starts in four days. Even now, seven months on from his first comeback match, he is still treated carefully. Southgate gave him 56 minutes against Montenegro, in which he scored, with a view to the extended 72 minutes he got against Kosovo. “In terms of the attributes [Oxlade-chamberlain has] for the position: perfect,” Southgate said, “because you need guys that can defend, and it’s obvious the attacking talent that he has in the forward runs he made at Wembley the other night and a couple of times [in Kosovo]. But against the top teams and against this opposition, we needed people who could do both sides of the game and he fits that profile brilliantly.”

Klopp has said in recent weeks that he wants more from the player who was a first choice for his club up to that Roma tie in April last year, and is not yet back at that level. He has started for Liverpool in the League Cup and the two Champions League games against Genk but for big Premier League games he has been on the bench. In an England team where there are fewer obvious choices as they are at Liverpool, Oxladechamberlain is harder to ignore.

There was a tidy performance from Harry Winks, and a late first England goal from Mason Mount but neither offers the dynamism and the experience of Oxladechamberlain or, it should be said, the goal threat. Much can change between now and March when England’s tournament countdown begins with those two friendlies and in the interim Oxladechamberlain has enough to do getting into the Liverpool side.

In 2018 he started both the March friendlies for England against Holland and Italy in central midfield as Southgate transitioned to the 3-5-2 formation that he would play that summer in Russia. He would not play again for the national team after that spring until September of this year. He scored in the Maracana stadium as a 19-year-old in 2013 one year before a World Cup he would miss with injury. He was absent from the national team for 17 months between October 2015 and March 2017, and yet the most serious injury of his career was the one from which he only recovered at the end of last season.

Every injury has been significant, and each time he has got himself back into contention to play tournaments.

This time is no different. The determination is to be admired and no one could deny that he deserves a little good fortune.