A class act? England could be an above-average football team, if not for Gareth Southgate’s ignominious Englishness [Berry’s Biennial Blast]
It has been quite a thrilling week for this country. The verdict is in, and it turns out we are not institutionally racist. We only hate our poor! Such a relief. We also learned, after three consecutive wins against stellar opponents, that England has a decent men’s football team. Euros, here we come!
Not so much. With a Prime Minister on a personal mission to impregnate as many white women as possible, and a national team manager who mistakes waistcoats for wisdom, we might have to consider the possibility that England is full of crap. Our football team is actually full of players who are mostly not crap, but that does not mean that summer glory awaits.
For all his faults, Gareth Southgate is probably the best England manager of recent times: less intelligent than Roy Hodgson, but a better politician, and more adaptable. In embodying some of the unfortunate things this country thinks about itself, however, his selections and coaching remain a drag on his team’s performance.
Trent warfare
The big call Southgate made in advance of the three World Cup qualifiers England contested this week was dropping Trent Alexander-Arnold, for the sin of not being as brilliant this year as he has been in the past two seasons (as a star player in a Champions League- and Premier League-winning team at the ages of, respectively, 21 and 22).
Alexander-Arnold is one of only three world-class players currently eligible to play for England. No matter what, you do not drop Trent. Don’t do it because you want to motivate him: his Liverpool form is not all his own fault. Don’t do it because you think Chelsea’s reserve right-back deserves a chance, unless Chelsea’s reserve right-back is also Trent Alexander-Arnold. Liverpool’s second- and third-choice right-backs are already better than Reece James, and even they cannot displace Alexander-Arnold.
Just do not do it, at any time, for any reason. Southgate always seems so eager to prove himself the equal of Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola — which he demonstrates by comically mismanaging their players.
Admittedly, Alexander-Arnold plays a more forward role for Liverpool than he has for England (at least when Liverpool have a functioning central defence). This is because Southgate continues to make the pre-Pep category error of seeing Alexander-Arnold as a full-back, albeit an attacking full-back. But Alexander-Arnold is only a defender in a nominal, starting-position sense (which is not to say he cannot defend: he is a world-class footballer).
In most teams, Alexander-Arnold would be playing in midfield. His game is similar to that of David Beckham at his brief peak. Perhaps he is slightly less of a goalscorer than Beckham — although he has time to develop this part of his game — but he has an identical range and is significantly quicker. He is certainly, already, more of a leader than Beckham ever was.
Southgate’s decision on Alexander-Arnold is particularly frustrating given the manager’s occasional preference for a 3–4–3 formation. He can play Alexander-Arnold in right midfield, with Kyle Walker on the right side of defence (arguably his best position now): two full-backs for the price of, well, two. Both can augment central midfield as game conditions demand, as they do domestically.
The point of this post, above all, is to contrast, and hopefully explain, the diverging England careers of Alexander-Arnold and his contemporary Mason Mount. Mount is now an automatic starter; Alexander-Arnold might not even make the squad for the European Championships. Admittedly, it is not either/or: both could play. And I might be wrong about Alexander-Arnold, because what do I know? (I would wager though that Klopp is better placed to judge, but perhaps his judgement is clouded, like all club managers, by a desire for his best players to play regular international football [shrug]).
Nevertheless, it does seem that Southgate is making decisions which do not make sense in pure football terms.
Selecting Mount is a decision he continues to make. Mount has an extraordinary international cap/club appearance ratio; at the age of 22, he has played only four times as many Premier League games for Chelsea (65), as he has played first-team games for England (16). Alexander-Arnold is the same age, but has fewer caps, having played almost double the number of Premier League games — not to mention the Champions League, in which Alexander-Arnold has made more than triple the number of appearances.
Nine-ish
I am going to circle back to Mount later. To fully appreciate the strangeness of his status, however, we need to first consider another key England player whose management by Southgate does not appear to be driven exclusively by football considerations: the penalty taker, Harry Kane.
Kane and Raheem Sterling are England’s other two world-class players. Southgate should see his main task as helping them to play together. He has got it wrong too often. But for the most part, especially in recent years, the 4–3–3 formation has worked well offensively — or, the talent and experience of the two over-rides any flawed instructions they may have been given.
There are, nevertheless, still times when Harry Kane roams the pitch like Dominic Cummings testing his eyesight. This predilection has been a frustration around Kane ever since Southgate became England manager. For all his goals in 2018, we forget that Kane played, absurdly, and unthinkingly, as a number ten in that tournament, with Sterling forced out of position as a centre forward.
Kane can play ten, but it is just such a daft thing to do when you are one of the world’s best number nines. It worked in Russia, up to a point, but now that the England team is full of proper tens, Kane seems to be dropping even deeper to find the ball, at least in some matches. The manager needs to explain to Kane that the multi-tens would be much better at their job if they had a nine to riff off. And for the avoidance of doubt, you can only play as a false nine when you are not already a nine to begin with. Sterling must play in the only position in which he excels, that is, as a wide forward. Lads, this is basic stuff.
There remains a sense, however, that Kane can play however he wants to play for England. Maybe it is because he is a proper Englishman. He is, of course, brilliant. But he is also, of course, a perennial loser. Like Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and Michael Owen before him (and Wayne Rooney, in international football). Like Southgate himself.
There is nothing wrong with being a loser: it takes one to know one, I guess. But that does not mean England cannot at least try to win. Kane has inherited the mythical mantle of the great English talisman. This Britannia unchained problem in Southgate’s team is not as pronounced as it once was. But it is a factory setting restored whenever England seem to be struggling — which they will be, rather frequently, in the summer.
Sermon on Mount
The reasons for Kane’s indulgence perhaps tell us something about why Mason Mount enjoys the status he now does. The stats show that Mason is very much Southgate’s man. Is it a coincidence they are both middle-class kids from the home counties? Does Southgate see a kindred spirit in someone not celebrated for his natural talent, but imagined to work harder and smarter than everyone else to make the most of his lesser gifts?
Is it a coincidence too that Mount is very much Frankie’s boy, having been developed by Frank Lampard at both Derby County and Chelsea? If Southgate could design the ideal Englishman, Lampard’s Tory boy template is probably where he would start from, despite Lampard’s persistent failure to recreate his club heroics at international level.
Kane and Mount are treated slightly differently by Southgate. Whereas the former is allowed to do anything he wants, the latter is asked to do everything the manager wants. He is an exceptional footballer. But we are talking about the elite-level international game: is there anyone not exceptional? Mount actually did fairly well further back in a midfield three versus Poland, amid a poor team performance. There is a place for him in the squad and, given the ups and downs of tournament football, he will deservedly get game time in the summer.
Mount’s problem — and therefore England’s problem — is that he is not as exceptional as Phil Foden, Jack Grealish or Jadon Sancho. These three create more, and score more, when given the chance. Foden might actually have a once-in-a-generation talent (time will tell), Grealish is unusually imaginative, and Sancho has significantly more high-level experience. Thomas Tuchel would swap Mount for any of them.
As well as being a good player, Mount also seems like a good guy. But even good guys can inadvertently come to embody something rotten. I am an academic, so believe me, I would know.
Mount’s hallowed status in this England team is, in my view, a product of institutionalised privilege. He is one of those players that Serious Football People like to proclaim as effective in ways that The Average Fan apparently cannot fathom. But evaluating Mount tends to begin by listing his attributes, the things he does well, the things he is better at than ordinary supporters might realise.
With almost everybody else, the opposite is true: we focus on what they cannot do, or have not yet done. Can he play a different position? Does he track back? Will he look as good in a better team? Will he look as good in a worse team? Their strengths are recognised simultaneously as weaknesses: he might have x, but that comes at the expense of y.
The shirt maketh
There is an uncomfortable contrast with the way players such as Alexander-Arnold, Foden and Grealish have been judged by Southgate. There is nothing inherently wrong with the negative-first assessment of elite footballers: it comes with the territory. But optimal selections depend on the same metrics applying to all, without prejudice.
I will start with Foden. What Southgate actually seems to expect from his younger players is a particular form of quietly dutiful Englishness. In his public remarks, he consistently emphasises the ‘mindset’ or attitude of his players, arguably ahead of their talent or role in the team. But assessments of what a good attitude (and worldview) looks like are clearly loaded with implicit assumptions. Even a moderating public figure like Southgate — who consistently seeks to associate his role in football with a New Labour-ish social inclusion agenda (and, to some extent, social justice) — cannot escape their pernicious influence.
Foden grew up in a very deprived part of Stockport (incidentally, not far from this blogger’s familial home), and many people will have heard about Foden becoming a teenage dad before they saw him play football. Foden infuriated Southgate when his Icelandic adventure (alongside Mason Greenwood) came to light, that is, when he had sex with a local in his hotel room, breaking covid-related restrictions in the process.
You can read Southgate’s comments in full here. On the face of it, they sound like those of any disappointed dad. But why was any of this being said publicly? Greenwood was only eighteen at the time. Maybe he does, in time, ‘need to understand the expectations of being an England player’. But I am fairly sure getting laid has always been part of what the men who play for England expect to happen as a consequence of being men who play for England. And Southgate’s expectations are only legitimate insofar as they are constitutive of a process of maturing as a footballer. On questions of morality, anyone making a living from the beautiful game would be well advised to mind their own.
Southgate is fixated on ‘the shirt’. His players must imagine themselves wearing the metaphorical three lions at all times. Downtime on international duty should only be spent lying back and thinking of England rather than… well, y’know.
From my distant vantage point, it seems Southgate is unable to conceive of a fellow professional who might think differently to him about playing football for their country. In my view, there is absolutely nothing wrong with seeing international selection as a personal accolade, as recognition of a well-executed talent. For Southgate — and he is clearly not alone in this — it is instead an act primarily of duty and representation, wrapped up in a sense of national exceptionalism. He can have whatever politics he wants, of course, but it is problematic from a sporting perspective when ideas around public image and appropriate behaviour intertwine with assessments of football ability.
Should working-class lads like Phil Foden really have to care about representing England, as much as people like Southgate clearly do, in order to represent England? How many flags do they need on their Jags? We are better than this.
Union Jack
Similarly, it is not difficult to detect in Southgate’s indecision about Jack Grealish a disdain for Grealish’s own indecision over whether to play internationally for Ireland or England.
I have no evidence to back up this suggestion, so could well be wide-of-the-mark, but sadly Southgate does have form on this sort of thing. Readers may recall my disgust at Southgate’s comments about Wilfred Zaha in 2017, when Zaha opted to play for the country of his birth, the Ivory Coast, over his adopted country. Once again:
If you don’t feel that internal 100% passion for England, then I’m not sure it’s for me to sell that to you. It should be your desire to do it … the inherent desire of wanting to play for your country is the most important thing. Jermain Defoe is a classic example. His whole life has been a desire to play for England from Under-16s all the way through. I don’t think if you’d approached him to play for someone else he’d have done it. That’s where I was with it too — I didn’t get capped until I was 25 and I had no interest in playing for anyone else. I’m English and proud to be English and I think part of your identity as a national team has to be pride in the shirt. So, for me, the commitment has to come from the player.
My understanding of Southgate’s attitude to Zaha was very much influenced by this disturbingly excellent New Statesman piece. As Daniel Harris observed, Zaha simply ‘indicated his desire to play for his country, it just isn’t the one that Southgate seems to think it should be’. By suggesting that a dutiful attitude towards England is inherently more creditable or virtuous, Southgate’s comparison of Zaha and Jermain Defoe veers alarmingly close to colonialist ideology. The bizarre comparison to his own wholly uncomplicated national identity is, frankly, appalling.
Through this lens, could Grealish have committed any greater sin than daring to care about a country — or even just a football team — other than England? Must all English footballers pass the cricket test?
I have no idea what complex motivations are or were present in Grealish’s mind — but nor, I suspect, does Gareth Southgate. We should at least allow for the possibility that the prospect of overlooking an ancestral affiliation to represent a country increasingly brazen about its imperial past might have figured in his thinking somewhere.
There is surely something in this institutionalisation of appropriate Englishness which explains the mystery of Mason Mount. Is Southgate’s decision to drop Trent Alexander-Arnold also related to my argument about embedded privilege and prejudice? With apologies for stringing you along: I honestly do not know. But it might be. I would like to make a related but subtly different point: for Southgate, Alexander-Arnold is actually too good to play for this England team. Or at least the wrong kind of good. His football is too sophisticated, and his outlook too cosmopolitan. In some ways, his career successes (like those of Foden) have come too easy, coddled by Klopp (or Pep).
Just like embarking on Global Britain by making trade with our neighbours more difficult, England only wants to win the hard way. And so: win, we will not.
It’s…… Jamie Vardy
The expectation of devotion to ‘the shirt’ obviously predates Gareth Southgate. One of the other ways it manifests is the notion of ‘retirement’ from international football, especially when the retirees continues to play at the elite level domestically. England really should not be contemplating going to the Euros without either Jamie Vardy or James Milner, despite their respective decisions to make themselves unavailable for England duty.
Vardy remains one of the best strikers in Europe, easily outscoring most of the young forwards being considered for the squad. (His longstanding under-utilisation by Southgate seems a little Foden-esque.) Similarly, Milner’s experience is largely unrivalled, as is his ability from the corner flag. He has faded for Liverpool this season — like most of his team-mates — but that does not mean he does not have one last summer of service in him.
The idea of retirement from international football is clearly a reaction to the kind of shirt-based commitment that managers such as Southgate demand from players, even among the tried-and-tested. Players such as Vardy and Milner should not have to turn up for farcical matches against San Marino. They should not be expected to play in the Nations League, a tournament that can be used to give young players more international experience. And they should not have to attend every training camp: they are not youth players, they are veteran professionals easily able to adapt to different styles and team-mates — and they work day in, day out with better coaches than the FA employs.
If older players end up being genuinely usurped by younger rivals, fine. If they really do not want to play for England, that is also fine. But the notion that a player who wants to prioritise managing their body towards the end of an intense career, or spending more time with their children after years of weekend working and airport lounges, should be excluded from representing their country is very silly.
Vardy or Milner might be precisely the player England needs at any given moment, in a match that actually matters. The fact that they both appear to have internalised the shirt fetish by prematurely self-isolating perhaps shows how deep this nonsense goes in the game.
The related notion that a player of lesser value might somehow ‘deserve’ their place more is a recipe for allowing non-football reasoning into team selection, and ultimately a path that leads only to Mason Mount.
An addendum: gimme five
Forgive me, but we are already 3000 words deep here. If you made it this far, I am guessing you might be interested in a final 400 on tournament strategy.
One of the not-entirely-ridiculous reasons for dropping Alexander-Arnold is that he might not be suited to the 4–3–3 formation, if playing as an orthodox full-back (although that is not a reason for him to be out of the squad altogether).
This is obviously a reason to play to 3–4–3, on the basis that you do not discard your best players. However, my preference would be for a 5–2–3 formation (essentially a variation of 3–4–3). It would involve playing five nominal defenders, albeit two as wing-backs. A central defensive trio of Harry Maguire, John Stones and Kyle Walker picks itself, but not necessarily in a good way.
5–2–3 involves a solid and cautious midfield partnership, protecting England’s dodgy defence as fiercely as the Met defends approximations of Winston Churchill. This is the midfield design employed by the current world and European champions in the men’s game.
England fans high on their supply of Dominic Raab braggadocio will retort that such a posture is excessively defensive: we would never have got such a good Brexit deal with this kind of attitude. I have some sympathy for Southgate in this regard. England’s manager is frequently criticised for his restrained selections, primarily by people who no longer remember the last World Cup. In reality, we urgently need to get to a place whereby the least successful ‘major footballing nation’ on the planet is recognised as such. I am happy enough to end this post, therefore, on a positive note regarding the manager. Southgate is correct that both Jordan Henderson and Declan Rice are required in the starting eleven, in complementary central roles, on most occasions. Southgate has managed both players well.
I am not yet convinced that he is right for the right reasons. As long-time fans of this blog will both remember, my firm view is that men’s international football involves mastery of set-pieces far more than the elite domestic game. England need a strategy for utilising set-pieces as a source of goals: they had such a strategy in 2018, gaming the new VAR system to win penalties, but this is unlikely to work again, given referees’ greater experience of the no-contact rule and the nuances of video assistance.
Crucially, we also need a strategy to avoid offering set-piece opportunities to opponents. Retaining possession within our own half is essential. And when the opposing team has the ball, the objective should be to control space so that they are forced to pass around England’s defensive players, rather than run beyond them, which, other things being equal, will result in fewer free-kicks, corners and penalties being conceded.
