Once again, the nation is in mourning. Not this time as a result the death of someone famous but worse still the catastrophic failure of the England football team. A half-decent performance against Serbia followed by spluttering, uneven draws against Denmark and, last night, Slovenia and following all the excitement in the build-up our failure is complete. We’ve won the group and qualified for the last 16 and found ourselves in the allegedly ‘easier’ side of the draw for the rest of the tournament. Someone should resign.
Unless you have been living in a cave, this is the normal way of how things go in England. It’s like this:
- England, usually unbeaten, top their group in the qualifiers for a tournament, and the excitement builds
- We often have a ‘golden generation’ of players. This is our time
- The expectation builds. How can the manager fail with a group as good as this?
- We depart for a tournament with newspaper headlines like “It’s coming home”
- The tournament begins and England stumble past massed defences and somehow reach the latter stages
- At this point, it’s obvious the players don’t care and the manager isn’t up to the job, we say
- We then play a much stronger team in the knock out stages and win. It isn’t pretty but you’d have thought a win, any win, is a good win. But in England, winning alone is never enough
- Next we play one of the favourites and lose agonisingly after a penalty shoot out
- And so on …
The manager is, of course, to blame and armchair coaches who have never played the game, never mind coached so much as a Sunday morning pub side, could have done better. The players are overpaid prima donnas who don’t care about playing for their country. If you don’t recognise this scenario, which happens pretty well every two years, then, frankly, you haven’t been paying attention. It’s what makes us English, the embarrassing levels of entitlement, how Johnny Foreigner should doff his cap and bow as soon as we take the field. The aftermath of last night’s draw with Slovenia, a super fit, well coached team, particularly in the art of shithousing, was a case in point.
Slovenia, ranked 57th in the world, sandwiched between the giants of Saudi Arabia and Paraguay should simply be brushed aside, should gaze across to the likes of legends like Keiron Trippier and Conor Gallagher and think: “We’ve no chance here. Let’s lie down and die.” Of course, that doesn’t happen. Instead, particularly in the group stages, the so called lesser teams defend in a low block and the superstar teams like … er … England have to break them down. It’s that easy, except of course it isn’t.
Should we have done better in our three games so far? Probably, yes. On paper, as they say, we were much better than Serbia, Denmark and Slovenia. On paper. But who ever won a game on paper? Was the selection to blame? Well, I think something like nine of the players in every team so far would have been picked by everyone. How about the tactics? Isn’t Gareth Southgate too cautious and too defensive? People keep telling me that, but I find it hard to believe the manager and his coaches set up a team to give the ball away too often or tell them not to attempt forward passes or shots at goal. But the manager has such a wonderful array of talent at his disposal. How come they keep misfiring?
Well, let’s look at the evidence. How many world class players do England have, players who would make the Earth squad to play Mars? Not the goalkeeper, for sure, who for all his qualities is not one of the elite players in his position and while Walker, Stones and the break out star Guehi have performed pretty well, they are not stellar world talents. We have barely any back up for Stones and Guehi and, in the continuing absence of Luke Shaw, no left back at all. The admirable Trippier gives it everything but his deficiencies are obvious, not least his understandable tendency to play everything with his right foot and sideways.
In midfield, we have no number six. People laughed when Southgate bemoaned the decline and absence of Kalvin Phillips, but as the song goes you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. Instead, we tried to plug the gap, first with the gifted Trent Alexander Arnold and then the limited but willing workhorse Gallagher. In short, it didn’t work, certainly so far in the tournament.
As for our superstar players, the likes of Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham, Declan Rice and Phil Foden, apparently they don’t care about playing for their country. It’s all about the money, money, money. Funny how it wasn’t about the money when we reached the semi-finals of the 2018 World Cup and, three years later, we were runners up in the European Championships. But maybe Southgate has forgotten how to coach a team. Can’t we just get rid of him now and bring in, say, England’s all time most successful manager Sam Allardyce (one game, one win)? We’d certainly have the route one tactics people seemed to demand last night. Where’s Andy Carroll when you need him?
I am not psychic – spoiler alert: no one is – but I knew this was coming. The ‘time for a change’ brigade have been increasingly vocal in recent years, a popular observation being that “Southgate has taken us as far as he can”, meaning that he is not capable of taking the team to a tournament victory, but someone else, unnamed of course, can give us one more push. Because it’s that easy. It’s not a popular view when England aren’t exactly setting the world alight, but I honestly think that there are few English managers available who could do better than Southgate, who had drinks thrown at him last night. Changing the manager rarely works at the worst of times and there’s no guarantee that taking a punt on another manager will pay dividends, if we think that all the next bloke needs to do is make one more heave. Honestly, I don’t think it works like that.
I’m not more of an expert on this than you are, so I could be wrong. But I don’t think I am. The English sense of entitlement, particularly in football, has only grown in recent years, although it was always there. I still remember how World Cup winner Sir Alf Ramsey was hounded out of office when we failed to qualify for the 1974 tournament. I well remember the criticism Bobby Robson took during Italia ’90 when he huffed and puffed our way to the semi-final and, obviously, lost on penalties to Germany and the golden days of Euro 96? Really. England had an epic win against the Netherlands but were poor in all our other games until the semi-finals when we played Germany and … we all know what happens in semi-finals against Germany. Terry Venables got so much stick. Luckily, time loves a hero.
Reading social media, you might forgiven for feeling the world was about to end. The manager and players should be sent home immediately, before being put in the stocks and later hung, drawn and quartered. It’s all they deserve. But next weekend it starts all over again. England against a modestly talented Dutch team who can’t defend, despite the presence of the best centre half on the planet (van Dijk), but they can attack and score goals, so expect an error-strewned evening of chaos before England run out winners on penalties. Who knows? Whatever happens, some people will always find something to complain about. We English always do. Even if we win the thing, a different manager would have made it better to watch.
One final thing: let’s not fall out about it. It’s only football. There are far more serious things going on in people’s lives and perspective matters. “What the world needs now is love sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of,” wrote Hal David and Burt Bacharach. Hear, hear to that and let’s include football and footballers. I’ve had more than my fill of the culture wars, as well as the varying levels of hatred that hang over our country in so many aspects of life. I would like to see football as some kind of release from the normal rigours of life. It’s so much easier, it seems, to hate than it is to love. I’m trying to change all that in my own life. Why don’t you? Come on, Gareth and the boys. Success isn’t always pretty but in football, as in most other things, it’s better than abject failure. Stop mourning this morning. It’s a beautiful day, if you want it to be.
