It has been a cruel few weeks for the senior players who have been the stalwarts of Gareth Southgate’s reign. They have been dropped and demoted, their feelings hurt sometimes while bodies have given way. John Stones had been a survivor of the Southgate cull, but there was a moment when it seemed he, too, would miss Euro 2024.
It came minutes into England’s final friendly against Iceland. A stricken Stones went down under a challenge from Jon Dagur Thorsteinsson. “I knew it wasn’t my knee or my ankle, because of the mechanism in how I landed, it was almost like my big toe in the line straight down my foot and you think ‘I have fractured it’,” he recalled.
The curse of the metatarsal has hit England in the past, broken feet, or bones in feet, a factor in summer disappointments. It looked as though 2024 could be a throwback to 2002 or 2006. If Stones’ importance has risen amid the injury problems of Luke Shaw and Harry Maguire, it looked as though Southgate could lose his only centre-back with World Cup or European Championship experience.
“I thought if I have fractured it, get the docs, tablets, injections, whatever it is, I don’t want to miss out,” said Stones; the fact he played on until half-time was a sign of his defiance. “It is a bit of a mind game as well: is it as bad as it is? Do you want to come off and it’s almost nothing?” Yet such determination to play may not have been enough to save him had the diagnosis been a four-week absence, if not more. Southgate may have been forced to summon a replacement. But Stones had an X-ray at Wembley on Friday, further scans on the Saturday. The results were encouraging. “Really minor stuff,” Stones said.
It was not the end of an interrupted build-up. After a reprieve came a virus. “It was a real rough 36 hours,” said Stones. “I don’t want to get into details.” The inference was that they were not pleasant. He was quarantined, confined to his room.
“I felt quite alone, to be honest,” he explained. “You are not at home. No one around you. And then being stuck in my room all day, no food. Not much water because it was coming out again.”
A return to training on Thursday was welcome then. But the last few weeks have been a stop-start affair. “Not how I wanted to end of the season,” said Stones, who only started two of Manchester City’s final 10 games. “If you start thinking and throwing your teddy out of the pram and saying I should be playing; of course, I believe I should be playing but that’s out of my control who picks the team.”
If he slipped down Pep Guardiola’s pecking order, he status as Southgate’s first choice has been underlined by the absence of his normal sidekick.
The expectation was that, as in the 2018 and 2022 World Cups and Euro 2020, Stones would have Harry Maguire by his side. Injury dictated otherwise. “Me and Harry, I don't know what the stat is on how many games we've played together, but it's probably quite a lot,” Stones said. “He'll be missed as well, not only by me, but the team. That’s the difficult part of the game. He'll be upset he's not here.”
Instead, Marc Guehi is his likeliest partner – “he’s like big sponge to learn,” added Stones, a fan of the Crystal Palace player – and he denied he is feeling more pressure to be a leader in Maguire’s absence. “A strength of mine is not thinking too much about what is going on,” he said. And yet that laidback nature can camouflage his determination. England were runners up in Euro 2020. Stones is determined to go one better.
“So I think there's a hunger for me to get over the line and get it done,” he added. “I'm a big believer in not hoping we can win [but] believing we can win. And having that feeling within you. I think that's something that I've inherited over the years from winning a lot of trophies and being in big games and trying to pass that on.”
It means he is sought ought by the younger players in England’s inexperienced squad. “I'm loving having a lot of questions from the boys and having insight into that second part of the season [with City], that we've become so good at.” In his case, he feels, mentality plays a large part in his success. “I'm not good at maths but I'd say it's a lot. Massively. To be able to control those emotions and channel them into the right things is huge. I don't know if it's a spiritual kind of thing.”
If not spiritual, England touched Stones when he came to Germany.
A welcome box was given to each player in his room when he arrived at their training base. Stones’ contained a photo. “I was signing at Barnsley in a full England kit. I cannot remember what age but I was super young,” he said. It connected him with his childhood dreams. “I was a kid, I loved it, loved putting on that shirt trying to score goals like Beckham. I couldn't do it but I loved it.”
He didn’t become the Barnsley Beckham but the classy centre-back did turn into the Barnsley Beckenbauer. And now, in Beckenbauer’s home country, with Southgate short of proven centre-backs, he has perhaps never been more important to England.
