England are very good and may even win, but the Euros matter more as a chance to revel in the unity and joyful dissent the game inspiresWe want to be free, to do what we want to do. We want to throw beer in the air. We want to dress up as Gareth Southgate in his kindly Victorian undertaker phase. And that’s what we’re going to do (with appropriate clearance and a favourable infection curve). We’re going to have a good time. We’re going to have a party.Watching the England squad announcement for next week’s World Cup qualifying triple-header it was easy to get lost in the familiar tropes, the muscle memory of a springtime tournament run. Here is an...
The attacking talent Gareth Southgate is keen to use keeps getting bogged down by stodgy and defensive selectionsShortly before half-time at the King Power at Den Dreef Stadium, Harry Kane could be seen scooting back into his own half to take the ball. Ten seconds later he was kicked heavily on an ankle driving through the centre circle. Ten seconds after that Kane was in an inverted left-winger role, cutting in to fire a cross-shot against the lunge of Jason Denayer.Throughout this sequence, a triptych of deep-midfield-Kane, playmaker-Kane and winger-Kane, it was hard not to long for another Kane: the ghost Kane, saving his spring, doing No 9-type things; and not forced to become Kane cubed, both pointlessly ever-present and...
Critics wanting a team built around a great creator ignore that successful national sides tend to play without riskThey’ll tell you football is a simple game, but it’s not, not really, not at the very highest level. It is still just about possible to win games by telling nine of your outfielders to stay behind the ball and whacking it long to the big bloke or the quick bloke up top, but not often and not consistently.Top-level club football these days is about complex structures, about pressing at the right time and in the right disposition, about disrupting the internal dynamics of the opposition while keeping your own varied enough that they are hard to disrupt. Related: Liverpool blow as...
Forget the Nations League: this is a rare opportunity for the England manager to perfect his tactics against superior sidesThere is a website called The Size of Belgium that for more than a decade has been dutifully tracking the Anglophone world’s curiously enduring habit of using the country’s area as a rhetorical unit of measurement. For example, “an area the size of Belgium” is lost globally to deforestation each year, according to the United Nations. The search area for missing flight MH370 was described in several media outlets as “the size of Belgium”. The Lonely Planet guidebook, meanwhile, refers to Yorkshire as “half the size of Belgium”.How did Belgium ascend to this exalted status? Not, you have to assume, through...
Prolific captain has added assists to his game and could thrive in a deeper role in Gareth Southgate’s 3-4-3 formationIt was the second game of Gareth Southgate’s tenure as England Under-21s head coach – away to Finland in 2013 – the team were trailing 1-0 and they needed a creative spark. On the bench was Harry Kane. “Which showed what we know about talent observation,” Southgate says with a smile.Southgate brought him on in the 58th minute, he played him as a No 10 and, nine minutes later, he watched him accept a pass in midfield, squeeze in between two challengers and drift away from a third before releasing Wilfried Zaha with a perfect ball around the full-back. Zaha crossed...