Declan Rice is the guy who has to break the news. It’s a good choice. Instinctively Rice feels like the kind of guy who you want breaking bad news. Rice in a veterinarian’s coat, clipboard under his arm, explaining that they tried everything they could, but Jimmy Chew just didn’t make it. Rice’s voice on a crackly wireless, informing us with a heavy heart that we are now at war with Siam. And here – less gravely – with his arm around Bukayo Saka, letting him know that he is now England’s left-back.
“I don’t think putting me out of position is the solution,” Saka said last week when the zany suggestion was put to him that he might be the man to fill the cosmic event horizon on England’s left side. Sucks for you, Bukayo! The man in the M&S polo shirt reckons differently. And so as Rice explains the situation, you can glimpse a certain grotesque bemusement in Saka’s expression, the look of a man finally having the ending of the film Saltburn described to him.
Here is the situation, in sum. Kieran Trippier is writhing in agony on the turf, Cole Palmer is on the touchline, ready to take over your position, and your mission – which you have absolutely no choice in accepting – is to relearn a role you haven’t played for more than three years, in the space of 26 minutes plus injury time. Oh, and England are losing 1-0 in the Euros, and if they go out, people will deluge you with abuse. Some of it will be racist. Good luck.
So Saka sets to work. Those opening minutes are spellbinding, a very public experiment into what happens when you throw an elite athlete into an entirely new role and force them to work things out on the hoof. No muscle memory or training to rely on here: even at Arsenal, Saka was more often a wing-back in a five rather than the left-back in a four. All he has to survive on is his wit, his will and his skill.
First test: a big surging run by David Strelec down the centre, into his space. Instinctively he tracks it, remembers the winger behind him, backpedals, remembers something called the offside trap, wheels back around to the left to maintain the line. Trippier trots back on to the field. Saka returns to the right. Before he can get there, Trippier is substituted. Saka returns to the left. So much for Southgate not having a Plan B: over the last hour of this game, he unveils about a dozen of them.
The first few touches are simple and compact. And he’s got help. Marc Guéhi takes most of the aerial stuff. Rice, his Arsenal teammate, drops in to cover so Saka can bomb forward. The problem is that when he does bomb forward, there’s not much work to be done. Phil Foden is trampling all over his space. So, too, Jude Bellingham. Later Eberechi Eze comes on and he likes a piece of the left wing, too. All Saka can really do is show for the ball, stretch the pitch, stay ready, do the job he was asked to do.
And in a team this lawless and unstable, this in itself begins to take on an outsized importance. When you consider that Saka has done most of his development under the intense, diamond-precision of Mikel Arteta, this is almost certainly the least structured, most shambolic team he has ever played in as a professional. He hasn’t set the world alight. But you can at least trust him to be where he is supposed to be.
Even amid the pandemonium, there are moments of connection. A neat little give-and-go with Eze. A sumptuous long diagonal from Rice. Saka will later return the favour, playing the pass from which Rice hits the post. And this, for all his individual talent, has always been the point of Saka as a footballer: the partnerships formed, the understandings built over time. You see it with Ben White and Martin Ødegaard at Arsenal. We even saw it briefly here with Kobbie Mainoo, at least until Saka was reassigned. Even as a makeshift left-back, he continually finds himself unmarked near the back post, waiting for the switch or the deep cross that never comes. In a team full of soliloquists, Saka doesn’t just want to talk; he wants to converse.
This is a player who ever since his breakthrough has found himself double-teamed, tightly marked, shut down and hacked down. And so he has learned to bring other players into play, to use his weaker foot, when to surge and when to shoot, when to hold it up and when to recycle, when to stay on his feet and when to take the foul. And he has done so while slowly increasing his attacking output year on year. Twenty goals last season, and yet – amid the blooming of Foden and Palmer – was nowhere near anybody’s Premier League XI. Which is fine. This is just what he does now.
And though he is yet to make a telling contribution this summer, he has been more active than you might think. In terms of expected goals for England, he sits just behind Bellingham and Harry Kane. Nobody in the tournament has received more progressive passes (defined by FBref as a pass that moves the ball at least 10 yards up the pitch or into the penalty area). Only seven players have made more dribbles into the penalty area. Not bad for a second-choice left-back.
It was interesting, in the buildup to the Slovakia game, how many pundits and observers saw Saka as essentially dispensable. But then, the English have always primarily seen football as a game of individual flourishes rather than one of connections, an impression reinforced when your best player smashes in a bicycle kick in the 95th minute.
Saka, of course, is perfectly capable of both. But in a team of inconsistent mavericks, perhaps it is his reliability that now appeals to Southgate. He doesn’t give the ball away in stupid places. He doesn’t wander out of position. He doesn’t start acting out or bawling at teammates or complaining about his rotten luck. By way of comparison, you try putting Bellingham at left-back and see how he reacts.
There is a bond of trust there, forged in the despair of the last European Championship final, when Saka missed his penalty and Southgate embraced him like a brother. The sort of trust that survives setbacks, the sort of trust that leads a beleaguered manager to play his right winger at left-back in the most desperate of situations, and know that he will not be let down. He may have made his name as the star boy. But increasingly, Saka is becoming Southgate’s rock.
