San Marino 0 (Rossi red card 68′) England 10 (Maguire 6′, Fabbri 15′ og, Kane 27′ pen 31‘ 39′ pen, 42′, Smith Rowe 58′, Mings 69′, Abraham 78′, Saka 80)
STADIO OLIMPICO — It has been slightly comical this week to witness some of the verbal gymnastics used by England’s players and manager to avoid causing offence to San Marino.
Gareth Southgate mentioned the need for on-field leadership in case anything goes wrong (with a straight face). It was as if talking about qualification for next year’s World Cup in the past tense would summon some deep karmic curse. Unfortunately for the Sammarinese, some chasms are too vast to be bridged by black magic.
This wasn’t a contest. It was barely a football match. The home crowd cheered every save made by Elia Benedettini but eventually gave up expecting to cheer anything else. It was a margin of victory and dominance so humiliating that the pre-qualifying argument will resurface.
There are very good reasons to resist it: tourism, loss of revenue, a fear that minnow nations would be pushed further into the shadows, the basic premise of avoiding changes that help the major nations. But that doesn’t alter the uncomfortable truth that this was not a good spectacle. Make your own choice as to whether that’s important. Harry Kane probably doesn’t. He has now passed Jimmy Greaves’ goals total and drawn level with Gary Lineker in the list of England’s all-time top scorers. Nor Southgate; he has overseen England’s record competitive victory.
The problem appears to be that San Marino are poor even by minnow standards and, with a population of 34,000, are unlikely to improve soon. They lost their two group games against Andorra by an aggregate score of 5-0 and had three shots on target over both matches. They have avoided defeat twice in the last seven years. Perhaps this is a manufactured problem – if England are roughly happy and San Marino are roughly happy with the status quo then who are we to disagree? International football’s job is not only to fill our Monday evenings with competitive action.
No, San Marino cannot cope with England. No, they probably won’t ever be able to. Yes, evenings like these can feel awkwardly formulaic and futile. But international football in Uefa exists as a qualification meritocracy and that structure has allowed Iceland and Luxembourg to grow, amongst others. Disagree all you please, but it’s a bit much to lay the blame at England’s door. And if you wanted competitive, tense football while England played, there were other options.
So instead, let’s reflect on just how enjoyable it is to have an England team for which major tournament qualification has become such a simple process that it causes an outpouring of tedium rather than angst. World Cup qualifying should be far more strenuous than for the European Championship (13 from 55 nations vs 24 from 55). England haven’t lost a World Cup qualifier since 2009, and even that was a dead rubber; go back to 2005 to find one that really mattered.
At this point, someone perennially grumpy usually pipes up to say that England only ever play fodder in qualifying, and on Monday evening they did. Never mind that Poland were the third-ranked second seed and Hungary the second-ranked third seed, or that several major European nations have struggled and stumbled their way through this qualification campaign. It’s hard to work out when England went from being of insufficient quality to their opponents being of insufficient quality, but it’s a pleasant change.
Still, they do bottle it at major tournaments. By which we mean two of the youngest tournament squads in England’s history represented the only country to have reached the semi-finals of the last European Championship and World Cup. Yes both summers were tinged with the lingering pangs of what-might-have-beens. But you would take that over never-looked-like-they-had-a-chancers.
And what of Southgate, who relentlessly sticks to his teacher’s pets at the expense of more courageous selections? He has given debuts to 20 different players since September last year; 14 of them were aged 23 or under. Conor Gallagher is the latest. That lays groundwork for the future.
On some level, tedium isn’t something that can be argued against because it is subjective – if someone says they are bored then they are bored. But there is a performative element to the England backlash that does strike as curmudgeonliness for its own sake.
If this England squad, filled with youth, technique, courage and the understanding of their power as cultural pillars capable of forcing societal change, does not make you proud, it’s hard to know what else they can do.
The biggest criticism of England is that they are boring because they make international breaks boring by winning most games too easily and aren’t attacking enough despite averaging more than three-and-a-half goals a game.
For those of us who remember 1994 and 2008, long summers when you persuaded yourself that it was better to escape unfulfilled hope and then badly missed it anyway, those feel more like compliments than insults.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3Co68Z4
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