Football

Gareth Southgate’s constant revolution leaves England in a spin


“At that moment, Svejk looked as if he had fallen down from the skies from another planet and was now looking with a naive wonder at a new world, where people were demanding from him idiotic questions he had never heard before.”

Jaroslav Hasek’s great Czech comic novel The Good Soldier Svejk follows its amiable hero through the contortions of central Europe during the first world war. Its real subject, though, is human folly, human conflict and the absurdity of human attempts to manage the chaos. At which point cut to Mason Mount on Friday night in Prague, another likeable ingenue who seemed at times also to have fallen from the skies, baffled by his own role in this drama, looking about himself in a state of otherworldly bemusement.

“We tried something to be more solid without the ball and that didn’t happen.” There was an oddity to Gareth Southgate’s comments after England’s first live qualifying defeat in 12 years. Not least because Southgate speaks with such startling clarity most of the time, an England manager who appears before the media like some chasteningly upright and flinty vision of rectitude, Abraham Lincoln in a Burton three-piece.

England fielded a 4-2-3-1 formation. This was a switch from the hitherto successful 4-3-3. That was a switch from the hitherto successful 3-5-2, which was in turn a switch from a previously serviceable flat back four. Southgate has been England manager for exactly three years now.

Constant revolution! So many previous England managers have seemed to be operating from an ad hoc soap opera script of big personalities, star players and celebrity stagnation. By contrast the past three years have been about planning, refinement, more planning, more refinement.

But then, everyone has a plan until they get overrun in central midfield by a trio of eager, ferrety Czechs. Watching Mount skitter between the high press of England’s attack and the open green spaces behind, it was hard to avoid the feeling of a vital sense of balance having been lost, of too much change, not just in personnel but in texture and shape.

The idea of being “more solid” referred to the presence of two holding midfielders, one of those Jordan Henderson, who is not suited to that role. But the choice to push Mount so high up the pitch as a No 10 skewed it from the start. Mount has played eight Premier League matches, none of them at No 10. Here he was asked, on his England debut away from home, not just to play as a No 10, but as a bespoke variation on the role, a hard-pressing dervish with secondary responsibility to orchestrate England’s movements when they had the ball.

The effect of managers is often vastly overstated. But this was a clear case of a good resource badly deployed, talent burned, a manager successfully inducing a poor performance from a wonderful young player in peak form, reduced instead to a Svejk-style hostage to fortune.

There is a theme here Southgate will perhaps ponder before the Group A date with Bulgaria in Sofia on Monday. Too much change, too much revolution: this should be the message of Prague.

There is, of course, no need to panic. This England team are still the same beast: strong enough in attack to beat mid-ranking teams; not strong enough to go toe to toe in the middle with better opponents, as recent tournament defeats have shown. Southgate is to be applauded for his attempt to find some other way to win, to compete against high-grade teams with more dominant midfields.

But the execution was awry. England are not good enough to do this all at once, to change personnel and shape, to give debuts to 20-year-olds all at the same time. Even the selection for the games against the Czech Republic and Bulgaria is a little reckless.

There have been complaints from the manager about the difficulty of switching to a back three with this squad and about the poor club form of some of the players. Why, in that case, drop the experienced, safe, unexhilarating Kyle Walker, who can play in a back three and is in good form for Manchester City?

In Prague three of the front six were not yet 21. This is the Southgate way, a high-turnover, high-throttle approach to the interchangeable unit that is the England team: more youth, more energy, ever more biddable young players. At one stage during the current break Southgate even talked about calling up Bukayo Saka, just turned 18 with four professional games behind him.

Which is fine talk but not the way winning teams have operated in recent history. France won the World Cup with a team of well-seasoned favourites, leavened with Champions League-ready young blood. A stodgy, orderly Portugal won the last Euros. Spain were orderly, settled winners before that.

Things that work in international football should be cherished. And yet the talk now is of another switch back to playing with three at the back. Careful what you wish for. When England changed to the current back four, Raheem Sterling had two goals in 40 caps. Since the related switch to a three-man frontline against Spain last October, he has eight goals in nine games. Why risk this powerful weapon with tinkering elsewhere? Why not simply follow the Liverpool template of a gristly three-man midfield, seasoned by the craft of a deeper-lying Mount?

Some will point to Southgate’s lack of experience in club management as a factor here, the contrast with the slightly wild free hand he has with England to select and rejig as he sees fit. Change is good, grand plans are good, new blood is good. But it comes with a warning too. England got theirs in Prague, a match that offered a reminder of their level right now and of the precarious nature of those recent gains.



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