The manager’s conservative style against Denmark shows stodginess is becoming his side’s defining flaw behind a marked lack of progressJust before half-time in Copenhagen on Tuesday night Conor Coady could be heard shouting “Don’t get bored!” at his England teammates as they shuttled the ball across the face of Denmark’s deep defensive lines, keeping possession, waiting for an opening, trying, it turns out, not to get bored.It seemed like an excellent piece of advice at the time. Albeit one that might have been better directed down the ring of pitch-side mics and into the ears of the watching TV audience, weighing up its continued engagement with a match that felt, for much of the 90 minutes, like being lulled into...
England’s manager has not had the easiest of weeks but he sent out an unbalanced side in Copenhagen and the end result was no real surpriseHow many holding midfielders is enough holding midfielders? If one holding midfielder is holding the space, can a second holding midfielder hold the same space if there is, technically, no space left to hold? And while we’re at it, how much more of this is there left?To their credit Gareth Southgate’s England team made an impressively committed attempt to answer these questions on a mild, crisp, occasionally hypnotic night in Copenhagen. This has not been an easy period for the national team. England came here depleted by injury, team-hotel-idiocy and an unavoidable lack of fitness....
Such a transgression in the era of Covid-19 will bring with it extra opprobrium but this is just young people doing what they have always doneBreaking news from Reykjavik: young people get bored and do silly things. Hold the front page, back page and indeed every page in between.The world may have shifted on its axis. Global sport may be menaced by the continuing vicissitudes of a viral bat-plague. But it seems some things remain reassuringly the same. Related: England's Foden and Greenwood sent home after breaking Covid-19 rules by inviting women to hotel room Related: Phil Foden struggles to find his rhythm in England's offbeat midfield | Barney Ronay Continue reading...
The Manchester City forward has matured as an international player by doing the things he knows he is very good atSquint a little and there was something weirdly retro about England’s victory in Iceland on Saturday night. This was a painful occasion for Gareth Southgate’s under-conditioned team, a game where the neat little touches didn’t stick, where the bounce was off, the grass unkind, the ball filled with helium, where England’s midfield seemed, somehow, to be always facing the wrong way.As the ball was shuttled cautiously across those deep blue defensive lines, this felt a bit like watching old, analogue, square-screened England. We shall remember them (if you really insist), that version of Albion who lived in fear of foreign...
The England debutant showed only flashes of craft in a game where graft was the deciding factorIceland in September: still cold enough to give you the shivers. Four years on from the Gothic horrors of Nice 2016 England came to Reykjavik looking for catharsis. In the event they got ... well, what exactly?Raheem Sterling’s late penalty ensured England took all three points from what was a slow-burn, at times rather painful experience. Gareth Southgate’s team were agreeably dogged, dredging up the sheer effort of will required to win away from home, through a fug of rust, against fiercely committed opponents. On a sunny mid-Atlantic afternoon on Uefa’s most westerly outcrop England had come clanking out of the blocks like a...