The final whistle blew, the boos swept around Wembley like ghosts of football past, the hot takes devouring Gareth Southgate fizzed across WhatsApp and social media, the pundits pulled apart goalless and shot-shy captain Harry Kane.
England were out, so were the knives – let the inquests begin!
Only, hang on. They weren’t out. Let me just double check this: they had four points, from two potentially tricky Euro 2020 group games against the previous World Cup runners-up and an unpredictable rival. And didn’t they… yup, they beat the runners up at the last World Cup. I know that was like a whole week ago but, that wasn’t bad, was it? I think a few people said England could win it after that one.
After the Scotland game on Friday night one England supporter called TalkSport and actually said the words: “Southgate has to go, tonight.” The guy didn’t even sound that drunk.
One tweet heading towards 10,000 likes and retweets over the weekend pointed to Southgate’s managerial “failings”. They included 12th, 13th and 19th with Middlesbrough, his England Under-21s finishing bottom of their Euro 2015 group. I put failings in quotemarks because it included reaching the 2018 World Cup semi-finals. “Beat Tunisia, Panama, Colombia and Sweden at the WC to gas a whole nation into thinking he is a good manager,” the tweet said. Adding a punchy “Fraud” at the end.
This sort of thing went on and on, for days. And if England didn’t play Czech Republic on Tuesday with a chance to top the group with seven points, it would probably have gone on longer.
England’s purportedly major problems – following a win and draw in their opening group games virtually guaranteeing progression to the last 16 – were multifaceted.
There were complaints from prominent pundits about the lack of game-time for Jack Grealish and Jadon Sancho. Sancho hasn’t kicked a ball, Grealish got 27 minutes against Scotland. Southgate’s biggest fault here appears to be… having a lot of good attacking players?
OK, say, for argument’s sake, Southgate plays those two instead of Raheem Sterling and Phil Foden, starters on the wings in England’s first two games. Is everyone going to be happy that Sterling, one of the world’s best players, and Foden, arguably the world’s best young player, on the back of a double-winning season with Manchester City and a Champions League final, have barely played?
What is Southgate supposed to do? Does he rotate them all every 45 minutes and appease everyone but appear clueless? Does he start Grealish, Sterling, Foden and Sancho behind Kane? This is not a video game. Or the internet. It’s a real-life football tournament. World Cup and European Championship winners are built on solid defences, not cramming in attackers.
So how do England stack up here? Oh, I see they are yet to concede a goal in their first two games. In fact, they have conceded once in eight games – against Poland, and that came from an unfortunate individual error from John Stones.
And after that weird, wobbly period in late 2019, when they conceded three goals against Kosovo and two v Czech Republic, in 18 games (and more than two years) they have kept 14 clean sheets. Two of the four goals conceded were against Belgium – the No 1 ranked team in the world.
The fickle nature of football fandom is well known, but is the reaction to England’s first week at Euro 2020 something else? Something all the more frightening? Is it the intense toxicity of social media spreading into society’s consciousness? Are we doomed to perpetually perceive everything in a negative light unless it reaches unobtainable perfection?
Tweeting: “A draw wasn’t the worst result in the circumstances, England are still likely to progress to the last 16” after the Scotland game was unlikely to do much damage on Twitter. Instead, it is the horrible, the sneering, the nasty 280-character opinions that catch fire. But at what cost? It has created a modern world where there is an expectation that your team must win every game right now by 15 goals. They haven’t scored for 45 minutes? Boring! They’re all frauds!
Only, again, real life doesn’t work like that. And just in case his social media savvy players were becoming swept away in the tsunami of negativity, in recent days Southgate has showed his players the statistics of previous World Cup and European Championship winners during the group stages. So I’ll show you, for a reassuring sense of perspective.
In the past 20 years, only two major international tournament winners have won all three group games. Spain, at Euro 2008 – not the toughest of groups: Russia, Sweden and Greece. And Brazil at the 2002 World Cup, when they beat Turkey, Costa Rica and China. Again, not the most difficult group.
Of the last 10 major tournament winners, four finished the group with seven points, two with nine, two with six, one with four and one with three.
Those last two were Greece at Euro 2004 and Portugal’s extraordinary scrape through the group stage of Euro 2016 with three draws, only progressing as one of the best-placed third-placed teams before going on to win it.
You are statistically more likely to have won a major tournament in the past two decades if you draw a group game. You are just as likely to win one with fewer than five points as you are with nine.
Imagine if social media was around when England drew the opening group game of the 1966 World Cup against Uruguay. Under a deluge of criticism, would they have even gone on to win it?
More from i on Euro 2020
- What the Premier League could learn from Euro 2020’s controversy-free referees
- The football nomad who became a hero for his role in saving Eriksen’s life
- How Ronaldo’s Coca-Cola stunt could change the face of football sponsorship
- In praise of Emma Hayes, the best pundit at Euro 2020 so far
- How to watch every Euro 2020 match on TV and online in the UK
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/35WnnTL
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