With a few people saying this is the best team in years etc, interested in what combined sides people would put out between the early 2000s side and the current one?
If that side had the team spirit and togetherness that the squad of the past couple of years have had then they'd have gone pretty close to winning something. It's common knowledge that a lot of players back then didn't like each other and only really mixed in their own club cliques.
What the squad have today is definitely something that goes under the radar but is a big thing that Southgate should be applauded for.
It's one of the excellent things he's done, but I sometimes think that he's been reduced to this vibes man who doesn't know anything about tactics. Like he's Eileen Drewery with England caps. He's not though, he's actually pretty smart with his tactics, it's just that often gets drowned out by the Twitter crowd screeching about how Southgate picks too many defensive players or needs to 'take the handbrake off' or something else equally inane. That lineup above is full of good players but it's a rubbish team.
You've got a right midfielder who plays narrow and withdrawn using his overlapping fullback to create space for him to put crosses in from deeper and a narrow midfielder on the other side in Scholes doing a fairly similar thing but inverted and in more of a playmaking role. Inbetween them you've got a goalscoring midfielder who wants to ghost around the pitch arriving late into the box to finish chances and an all action midfielder next to him who isn't a box to box, isn't a holder and isn't an attacking midfielder. Both these players had brilliant careers being the spare man in a midfield where they could play in a fairly unique way because the players around them were more rigid in their roles. In front of that you've got a pacy finisher looking to run off the shoulder and a maverick attacker who can do anything but was instead asked to do everything. That is a team constructed entirely on Match of the Day conversations and newspaper columns. It's awful, I hate looking at it.
Southgate doesn't do that. He knows that the teams who get to finals are the ones who don't get beaten, not the ones with the best players and he sticks to making sure that the style is as consistent as possible so players who are getting increasingly complex instructions every day at club level aren't also reinventing themselves every time they turn up for international duty. They know their team mates, they know how they're going to play, they're hard to beat as a result. That 2004 team was essentially picked by committee, newspapers wondering how you play Lampard and Gerrard together when the answer is you don't. Pick one and shut up. If you're going to play Scholes on the left and Beckham on the right as Ferguson often did at Utd then make sure your middle is hardworking, defensively minded and stable (Ferguson would go with Keane and Butt or Neville) not insane and individualistic. Or don't play both Scholes and Beckham there, sacrifice one for a bit of pace on the other wing and a middle that can shuffle across in transition. If you're going to let Rooney be his free self before Ferguson has tacticted him into a 30 goal striker then put some structure in behind him. Southgate could cuddle that 2004 team into an Avengers-style best friends club and they'd still be picked apart by decent teams.
I kind of agree but also I’m in the negative club towards Southgate. Yes his record at major tournaments is good but I personally think that has been despite him. I don’t feel England will ever win anything with him as manager. When we have had opportunities to put teams to bed in crucial games the bloke bottles it a top manager would actually have won those tournaments rather than being plucky losers
The thing is though, over 70 years of history tells us that this is an absolutely crazy thing to think. England have been getting in their own way for decades and Southgate is the first manager in many of our lifetimes to ever give them the ability to stop doing that. Since the first World Cup England could enter in 1950 England have won exactly one tournament. Since then Southgate has taken us to our best ever World Cup finish since 1990 and our best ever European Championships finish, where I really think we were one slightly better placed Rashford penalty away from winning it. In all this time we've sometimes had better players than we have now, we've been up against far less professional outfits throughout the tournaments and we've still failed to achieve anything at all. Southgate has taken us to a semi-final, a final and a quarters and it's mad to say the team has done that despite him. Genuinely mad. I know people get upset about his game management. He isn't perfect and it's true we really might win nothing with him as manager but who is this top manager who would have won those tournaments? Why don't we get him? Why doesn't everyone? Why didn't Eriksson and Capello win us a trophy? They were top managers at the time.
The problem for Southgate is everyone fixates on the matches where it didn't work and then completely forget that it wasn't that long ago we were absolutely dragging ourselves through group stages filled with terrible teams and then crossing our fingers that we would even get to the round of 16 let alone win the thing. I remember us getting tonked by Croatia and not qualifying for the Euros, getting schooled by Iceland, not winning a single game and exiting at the group stages in Brazil, getting beaten to a group stage progression position by Romania. I remember needing a last minute magic free kick against Greece just to get to the 2002 World Cup and I remember England getting booed off after barely beating Macedonia, with Rooney giving a bit of abuse back to the fans on camera. Now we stroll through qualification (where people complain that there's two defensive midfielders on the same pitch. Two!) generally unbeaten and unphased before comfortably navigating the group and then picking off weaker teams until going toe to toe with proper teams, all with a team of players who we don't hate for their ridiculous behaviour. And people just take that for granted now and moan that Southgate is a bottler.
Honestly, I sometimes think we don't deserve the fact that we don't have to hide behind our sofas in group stage games against Sweden or Wales anymore. The most difficult questions we have to ask ourselves now are 'are we good enough to beat the current world champions?' rather than 'do you think a point against Slovakia will be enough?' Southgate's record at major tournaments is good despite him? Give me strength.
The Southgate in/out debate is quite possibly the most tedious in English football at the moment.
It really shines a light on the fact that, for some very strange reason, we simply cannot accept somebody doing a good job with the national team without having to find a way to poke holes. I don’t even remember Capello/Hodgson having to face such criticism.
We’re just a really weird country with this stuff. We’re our own worst enemy in many respects.
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