England's Reality Check

So near yet so far

There is no doubt credit must be give to Gareth Southgate, his background staff and his squad for the optimism raised by their exploits in Russia over the last few weeks but there there will also be a sense of missed opportunity that will take a long time for us to forget. The cards had fallen for them and surely they had an unbelievable opportunity to create history.
BUT :-
In choosing the squad he did Gareth Southgate made a statement. No, it was not the fact that he chose very young enthusiastic players, it was the fact that he chose only to take two players who play regularly in midfield. That indicated that he was going to play direct football with a 5-1-3-1 system hoping, like Liverpool, that his quick strikers would catch teams out and against the lesser equipped teams early on it worked.

You can discount the game against Belgium on the Group stage, even though England lost, as it had little meaning but when they came up against stronger opposition like Columbia it was a diffrent matter. In the second half of that game Colombia were much better than England and had to rely on Jordan Pickford to get them through on penalties. 

Then they played a Sweden team who side included several players who do not play for the better teams and who were in awe of England. Both played a similar sort of game; long ball and feed off the bits.

England's captain Harry Kane could not be happy playing the style of football Southgate's side deployed. England were forced to resort to 'very basic football' resulting in England's best striker only having five shots on target in all the games. At Spurs he has Christian Eriksen picking him out with incisive balls but in this tournament only Henderson played in midfield and that is not his forte. The same could be said of Lingard and Dele Alli who rely on the same service, and as with sterling they are not natural midfielders. Loftus Cheek was the only other midfielder in the squad and featured fleetingly.

The bottom line is that you will not win the trophies or dominate football matches unless you've got good players in midfield who can keep the ball and pick out an incisive pass.