Any wild assumptions that Gareth Southgate had created an England side close to the finished article because it reached the semi-finals of the World Cup in Russia were steadily expelled over a ninety minutes at Wembley on Saturday, in which a spirited Spain team determined to arrest their recent decline summoned ghosts of the Three Lions’ apathy-inducing past with a 2-1 victory.
While there were encouraging spells from an England team that scored in just the eleventh minute, producing some tenaciously technical football in the process to beat the visitors’ high press, the overarching theme of the match was Spain’s ability to control the direction and tempo of the game by dominating the midfield.
Much has been made of the gulf in quality between the two engine rooms and admittedly, La Roja’s is far superior in not only talent but also meeting the demands of international football; Luis Enrique hopes to take this team down a more direct avenue of playing yet they’re still one of the best in the world when it comes to keeping the ball and wearing down the opposition by shifting it between the lines. Croatia showed at the World Cup how decisive a midfield of that playmaking quality can be on the global stage.
But the real problem here wasn’t ability – rather the structure of the England team, which left Dele Alli, Jesse Lingard and Jordan Henderson dangerously outnumbered and eventually pinned the hosts so far back that the shape of the formation fundamentally changed.
3-1-4-2 became 5-3-2 as the wing-backs tracked wingers, the centre-halves sat deep and the three midfielders were subsequently left with too much closing down to do. Their pressing became fractiously ineffective, as Spain always found an outlet in full-backs Dani Carvajal and Marcos Alonso.
[brid autoplay=”true” video=”288872″ player=”12034″ title=”Rafas Pub Facts Murray The Magician & Desperately Seeking Zaha”]
It induced painful flashbacks of the many decades in which a tactically outdated England found themselves outnumbered in key areas by elite opposition and eventually unable to break out of a rigid formation, pushed so deep every attempted system essentially resulted in the same low, defensive block waiting for something fortuitous to change the direction of traffic.
It was also a key reminder of how 3-1-4-2 is no mystical act of tactical revolution devised by Southgate and Steve Holland to instantaneously move England to the forefront of the game and complete loyalty to it should be left behind with the nostalgia of Russia 2018. It captured the zeitgeist of the moment, the profile of England’s emerging young talents, the weaknesses of lowly Group Stage opposition and the strengths of a squad lacking a few key components – but it deserves no sanctity beyond the tournament itself.
Having lost to Spain in eerily similar fashion to semi-final opponents Croatia, who also dominated the ball to push England’s wing-backs down the pitch and outnumber them in midfield, it’s clear an idiosyncratic setup, no matter how well-fitting it is for the players at hand, isn’t the answer to all of England’s problems. In fact, when faced with a team who know how to use the ball well, it only further exacerbates some of the old ones.
And yet, while many of those issues will inevitably take time and development to solve – perhaps even a new generation of young England players breaking through to challenge the current ones – the immediate concern is how long it took Southgate to recognise the obvious problems.
Admittedly, England ended the game strongly after finally pushing forward enough to reorganise themselves again as a 3-1-4-2, but that was through sheer determination and industry rather than any tactical twist on Southgate’s part.
Indeed, despite being almost completely dominated for the middle hour, England finished the match using the same formation they started with, every substitution being like-for-like, as Southgate allowed the same Spain-inspired foils to repeat themselves, chiefly Alli and Lingard failing to get anywhere near the ball in their futile attempts to simultaneously stop central midfielders and full-backs and Henderson consequently being left with simply too much to do in front of the back three.
It highlights Southgate’s biggest misgiving since taking the Three Lions berth – the failure to carve out an obvious Plan B for when the 3-1-4-2 setup doesn’t work. Easier said than done, of course, but England suffered against Croatia because there was no alternative to turn to and even if there isn’t a fail-safe tactical template in place, Southgate’s inability to change up in-game is equally worrying.
It doesn’t take a mastermind to tweak 3-1-4-2 into a 3-4-3, a setup that would have left the middle more open but at least put pressure on Spain’s full-backs – who had the most touches of the ball of anybody involved in the Wembley clash.
[ad_pod ]
In some ways, it feels harsh to criticise Southgate, especially after taking England to their joint-second best ever finish at a World Cup. But that achievement is already being juxtaposed by the potential of becoming the first manager in Three Lions history to oversee four consecutive defeats, should England lose to Switzerland on Tuesday night, and although Southgate still comes across young and fresh-faced, he’s also a manager with 209 games from the dugout under his belt.
He’s developing as much as his youthful England team, but reacting to situations with in-game tactical changes shouldn’t be beyond him either and as the senior team manager he’s yet to show he’s capable of that. England’s immediate aim is to advance to the next level, where they’re capable of consistently beating teams like Saturday’s opponents, but to achieve that the manager will need to evolve as much as this work-in-progress team.
As much as 3-1-4-2 was an ingenious setup for a month in Russia, Southgate’s reluctance to part from it even for momentary spells is already starting to hold England back.