What went wrong? What vital lessons can be learned? How can we make sure England don’t fail again? The postmortems after tournaments are always wearying. So many people have a panacea, an idea of the one detail that will guarantee success. If only we had a deep-lying metronome like Rodri! We’ll never win anything until we control midfield! Unleash this unprecedented generation! Cast caution to the winds! Let the players play! Release the handbrake! Be more like Italy! Be more like France! Be more like Spain!
Gareth Southgate’s greatest strength was his capacity to shut out the noise. A lot of it seems to derive from a basic misunderstanding of football. Being more attacking is a fine sentiment, and perhaps it is true that England could have taken a few more risks with their passing, but the reason England lost against Spain was that after Kyle Walker’s 75th-minute throw-in back to John Stones, which led to Jordan Pickford belting it out for a goal-kick, they didn’t touch the ball in the Spain half for 13 minutes, during which time they conceded. The issue was not what they did with the ball; it was getting the ball back.
Many of the solutions are rooted in the weird idea that losing in a major final is failure, as though England – mighty nation that she is with her glorious record of one tournament won of 35 entered – should expect nothing but the trophy. If Southgate’s successor reaches even a semi-final he will become only the fifth member of the elite group of England men’s managers to have progressed so far. In four tournaments under Southgate, England reached two finals, a semi-final and a quarter-final. Measured against the record of his predecessors, that is a run of extraordinary success; no other country in the world has been so consistent over that period. The question more reasonably, then, becomes less what a new manager must do differently than what he must keep the same.
Which is not to say that everything is perfect. There are always improvements that can be made. It’s more to establish a tone, to ensure that the successes of Southgate are not lost in the urge for revolution. He improved the atmosphere around the squad, did away with club cliques and largely suppressed damagingly large egos – although there have been hints this summer that some work may be required again in that regard. Penalty shootouts are no longer a neurosis. Playing for England came to seem again a privilege it was worth having.
Southgate’s last tournament, for all that they were level in the final with four minutes remaining, was probably his worst. There was a failure of preparation, the issue of Declan Rice’s midfield partner left unresolved for too long, which, in combination with the absence of a left-footed left-back, led to an imbalance that in turn clogged up the more creative end of the team. As Southgate acknowledged, England struggled to replace Kalvin Phillips. Although Kobbie Mainoo did a fine job against Switzerland and the Netherlands, his inexperience showed in the final; but anyway, he does not have the deep-lying profile of a player who would probably get the best out of Rice.
The days of calling for root-and-branch reform, happily, are over, the success of the elite player performance plan and the England DNA programme evident in the glut of creative midfielders and forwards of high technical level. That they still don’t look as comfortable as Spain in possession, that they are still prone to the sort of panic that consumed them against Denmark, is less to do with technique than mentality; the shirt still weighs heavily and will probably continue to do so until a trophy is won.
But England still don’t produce deep-lying midfielders who are comfortable on the ball: there is no English Rodri or Sergio Busquets or N’Golo Kanté or Jorginho or Andrea Pirlo. Michael Carrick, perhaps, might have been close but was collateral damage in the endless Gerrard-Lampard debates. More recently, Phillips is the closest England have had. Nothing in football is essential. There is no one way to win. But a ball-playing holder would solve a multitude of issues in terms of the balance of midfield while offering the opportunity to control the game. It’s a long-term plan, but it is perhaps worth looking at youth development and asking why that might be.
Perhaps more significant and also more contentious is the issue of coaching. England are now producing players but only three English managers are coaching in the Premier League (as opposed to five Spaniards), while the list of living English managers to have won a major trophy in Europe numbers 10. Other than Graham Potter, who won the Swedish Cup with Östersund, Steve McClaren is the youngest of them at 63.
It may be true, as numerous English managers have claimed, that they have the talent but are overlooked for elite jobs because they are perceived as being somehow insufficiently glamorous or lacking in the requisite experience; it’s certainly a familiar pattern for a promising manager to lead a side to promotion to the Premier League only to be chewed up by having to compete with sides with far greater resources. But even if the issue is structural, the production of managers is nonetheless an area in which England seems to lag behind other major European nations, which then has a knock-on effect on their capacity to deal with elite players and to compete in major semi-finals and finals. It certainly reduces the number of realistic candidates when seeking an England manager.
In the more immediate term, whoever takes over will have to deal with the three interrelated issues of the back of midfield, the lack of width on the left and how many forwards can be accommodated. But new problems will arise; they always do. And that’s the truth of major tournaments: good planning helps, and England have benefited from that under Southgate, but a lot of the job is about problem-solving on the fly and bodging a way through.
It’s not to say that you shouldn’t aim for it to point out that very few teams win tournaments quite as impressively and comprehensively as Spain did.
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