I believe that that was bad. Not Nice bad. Not Cape Town bad. Certainly not Belo Horizonte in 1950 bad. But be in no doubt, after the fluidity and free-scoring of Monday’s opening game and the hope that England’s struggles since the turn of the year could be behind them, this was a return to stodgy, uninspired, set-piece reliant fare that has pockmarked the Gareth Southgate era, and it was bad.
Southgate warned that this would be a very different game compared to Iran. He was right about that. But he also predicted that it would be played at “100 mph” and that his players would have to be at it from the first whistle. If that was the type of contest he was expecting, he expected wrong, and perhaps that misreading of the challenge that the United States posed was at the root of England’s below-par performance.
