COLOGNE — It was extraordinary that a group of the world’s best players was suddenly incapable of pressing their opponents as a team. As though they had turned up to England duty and a switch had been turned off.
Even more unfathomable considering three of the starting XI in England’s opening two Euro 2024 games play for Pep Guardiola’s ultimate pressers, Manchester City.
Pressing – essentially pressuring your opponents into losing the ball – has become one of the most fundamental parts of the game, refined and perfected and pushed to new levels by the likes of Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp. But England seemed to have forgotten how to do it.
Kyle Walker, one of that City trio, said the players didn’t know how to press as a collective after the Denmark game. Captain Harry Kane said they didn’t know how to put the pressure on when Denmark and Serbia dropped so deep.
Declan Rice – one of football’s ultimate pressers at Arsenal – was at least able to give some insight into why that might happen.
“From the moment I walked into Arsenal in preseason until the last game of the season when we were preparing for Everton, you get together as a collective and you work on that every single day,” the midfielder said.
“Whereas here you only get a week, 10 days max in an international break during the season.
“There’s a massive difference between getting a whole year to work on something and only getting a certain number of days. It’s about getting the team together when we’re here and buying into how Gareth [Southgate] wants us to press and how he wants us to play.
“It’s about getting that balance right, choosing when to go and picking your moments. You’ll see an England team against Slovenia that will have a different pressing style that we’ve been working on. I think you’ll see a team that wants to be on the front foot and wants to press Slovenia high up the pitch.”
By all accounts it sounds as though a great deal of the work England have been doing in training since the Denmark game has been on nailing down the press. They have been running through countless drills, pausing when things don’t work, discussing as a group how it can be better, running them again and again. Trying to step out of the pressure cooker and into the presser cooker.
Gareth Southgate has spent the last four days working out how to fix England, how to fix that pressing problem, how to recalibrate his team. Still, you will be bitterly disappointed if you want him to make major changes to what he feels is his best tournament team. He will probably make a few tweaks and add some fine tuning.
“Our identity for a while has been pretty clear,” Southgate said. “We haven’t quite seen that in the first couple of games and there was a need to have a reset button and have open and honest conversations.
“We reflect as a coaching team. The players are reflective. So nobody has been ducking anything this week, nobody has been alone in their thoughts. It’s a real collective because we’re all on the same page. That allows us to assess where we were and how we need to progress in the same direction.”
Indeed, Rice explained: “If you look at England games, our last 25 to 30 games we’ve played at Wembley, we’ve suffocated teams at the higher end of the pitch. I can tell you now it’s not one of our game plans to want to sit in a low block.”
In the aftermath of that soulless draw with Denmark, in a four-day gap in which former and current England stars traded barbs in soundbites, where scores of solutions have been offered that include dropping the captain and all-time scorer and playing Adam Wharton in a back three, Southgate has avoided making a “knee-jerk” reaction.
“Your best players are still your best players,” he pointed out.
“We might not have functioned as a team as we would have liked but we shouldn’t be throwing everything out of the window.
“That’s where we have to stay calm and make sensible decisions.”
Kane is set to start again up front, while Southgate has been weighing up whether to add more width on the left wing – the most natural player would be the inexperienced Anthony Gordon – but could stick with Phil Foden there, who has been playing more inside, alongside Jude Bellingham and Bukayo Saka in the three behind Kane.
Trent Alexander-Arnold is expected to be replaced by Conor Gallagher, which will free Rice to play as the more attacking of the two central midfielders – a position he is more than familiar with at Arsenal.
“My game is being on the front foot. I love being on the front foot as a midfielder, anticipating passes,” Rice said.
“I hate having to be stuck in one position and that is why, in the last game, I was really frustrated with myself because I couldn’t get up to their midfield players.
“With my season at Arsenal, I’ve been constantly wanting to be on the front foot, win balls higher up the pitch. That’s the mindset of the team as well and I think we’ll see that against Slovenia in the way we are going to approach the game.”
Luke Shaw was able to train back with the team for the first time in a week yesterday. While not expected to play against Slovenia, it is a positive development that Shaw could yet play a significant part in the knockout stages of the tournament. Kieran Trippier is fit and expected to start again.
England are virtually qualified for the knockouts — it will be an extraordinary set of circumstances that mean four points isn’t enough to qualify as one of the best third-placed teams — and Rice said that prospect will afford the players the “freedom” to put in a statement performance to top the group.
If they fail to do that, if they are unable to fix the press, the pressure will only keep pressing down on them.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/NKGeSJ6
Post a Comment