For all his goal scoring ability, Pep Guardiola cannot trust his forward to deliver at clutch moments in the biggest gamesRaheem Sterling made a dart in behind Vincent Kompany to receive an angled pass from Luis Suárez. His first touch, with the outside of his right foot, took him outside the line of the right-hand post, some 12 yards from goal, with Kompany and Joe Hart between him and the net. He turned back inside, opening an angle to curl a left-footed finish between Hart and Pablo Zabaleta into the bottom corner. Hart shuffled and Kompany closed in, only for Sterling to jink back and roll the ball through an implausibly large gap into the right side of the goal.That...
The hour of steadily mounting pressure on the Denmark goal was the like of which England have not produced in 25 yearsGareth Southgate values control almost above anything else. For England, this has been a tournament about control. He has talked about aping Portugal at Euro 2016 and France at the World Cup, of learning how to manage games. But there are two ways of controlling games. There is controlling games by attacking, as England did with remarkable intensity and consistency between the start of the second half and the end of the first half of extra time, and there is controlling the game as England did in the second half of extra time, keeping the ball away from Denmark...
Rodgers reaches his first English final, Spurs wait on Harry Kane’s ankle and Norwich make a welcome returnBrendan Rodgers’ previous FA Cup semi-final visit, in April 2015, ended in disaster, a deserved 2-1 loss with Liverpool to an Aston Villa team inspired by a teenage Jack Grealish. That was an afternoon when Liverpool froze but six years on, Rodgers is a manager with considerably more chops. His Leicester team approached their Sunday night visit to Wembley with poise, confidence and patience. On the sidelines, and even above the 4,000 fans in the stadium as part of a post-Covid experiment, Rodgers’s baritone was audible, talking his players through each passage of play. His suit is always reassuringly expensive but Rodgers remains...
Manchester City forward was the one figure in this England team running with real purpose – but his game is still a little misunderstoodWith 58 minutes gone at Wembley, the score 1-0, and all sense of attacking pep drained from England’s fuel cells, an important life lesson presented itself.Just as you can win a tournament game on the small details, by turning this game of rich human variables into a series of managed collisions, so you can also ship a goal from nowhere via a shanked pass from a high‑grade central defender prone to moments of high‑grade dither. Related: Maguire's blast bails out Stones as England scrape nervy win over Poland Related: England 2-1 Poland: Player ratings for Gareth Southgate's...
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...