Now, before we come down too harshly on the man, England did manage to win their group, but this might say more against the other three sides than it does for England. It wasn’t just Saka and Rice who finished the group stage with little to show for their efforts. Harry Kane, winner of the past season’s Bundesliga Golden Boot after scoring 36 goals in 32 matches, netted just once in the Euro group stage. Jude Bellingham, La Liga’s Player of the Season thanks to his 19 goals and six assists in 28 matches, can only point to one goal scored in these Euros. Phil Foden, EA Sports’ Player of the Season after his 19 goals and 8 assists in 35 Prem matches, has cut a frustrated and frustrating figure on the pitch for England.
You get my point by now. I’d go on, but I’m a lazy, lazy man. Southgate has somehow reduced what many have breathlessly called England’s best-ever squad—or at least its best squad since, well, the last few decades—to a boring, pedestrian side that could only score twice in three matches despite being vastly inferior opponents. England came into this tournament as one of the favourites to win it and found themselves in one of the easier groups from which to advance. Their UEFA coefficient of 104.3 was #1; their nearest opponent Denmark came in at 31.4. I don’t see a bigger gap from the highest-rated to the second highest-rated in any other group (but I could be wrong—hence the sentence that started this paragraph).
Still, it takes a lot of talent to negate the kind of talent Southgate has at his disposal. Still, there’s time for him and the squad to rise up after the group stage, to take the criticism and thrown beer cups and “unusual circumstances” and storm through to the final, proving the naysayers wrong, but time grows thin. He had complained previously of the squad lacking the fitness to press as he wants it to, but he also had three matches against overmatched opponents to tweak, refine, and adapt. He didn’t. Instead, he’s taken some of England’s finest talents of their generation—Saka, Rice, Kane, Foden, and Bellingham, among others—and hung them out to dry in an almost-obstinate refusal to admit that his critics may just have a few salient points to make among the other brickbats they’re hurling.
Look. I know that throwing together a national team can be a tricky business. Most of them rarely if ever play together. If anything, most of them play against each other. They only get a few weeks and a few friendlies here and there to coalesce. Ask yourself this, though—what kind of identity has Southgate forged in the eight years he’s been at the helm? When you think of other sides such as Spain, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, or the Netherlands, you can probably imagine and therefore anticipate the broad brushstrokes of how they’ll play. There’s an identity, a culture, a philosophy. England doesn’t seem to possess that, aside from the amorphous and aspirational “it’s coming home” anthem.
To a degree, that’s a deeper problem that goes beyond Southgate’s ability to fathom. Still, the fact that he’s still so far from plumbing its depths after all this time should stand a serious concern. For those of us who are Gooners, we will surely find ourselves worrying that Southgate will run our beloved Saka and Rice into the ground as he shortens the list of players whom he trusts and over-relies on those whom he does. I’ll stop short of saying that I hope that England do not progress far into this tournament so as to spare Saka and Rice those efforts; after all, last I checked, a fair few Gooners are Britons who also support the Three Lions.
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