There have been and will be many problems for England manager Gareth Southgate to find solutions to during Euro 2024. Players getting injured, players’ partners giving birth, players falling off bikes.
It is all part of being England manager at a major tournament — one of the most pressurised and scrutinised jobs on the planet. Still, there is one issue emerging as perhaps more pertinent than all of the rest put together.
How does Southgate solve the conundrum of Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham? The relationship between England’s No 9 and No 10 has performed a deft but alarming disappearing act in Germany.
The only thing more surprising about the statistic that Kane and Bellingham, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid’s top-scorers last season, passed the ball to one another only once in the Slovenia game was that they had only shared one pass in the game before that, against Denmark, too. Kane rolling the ball to Bellingham in one game, and Bellingham rolling it back in the next, like the most drawn-out one-two ever.
It is an area that Southgate and his coaches have tried to address, but seemingly not to great effect.
Back at England’s training base in Blankenhain, before the final group game Kane and Bellingham watched analysis clips of the Denmark match to identify ways they could play more cohesively.
Kane said he is “always” talking with Bellingham about how they can improve and there is maybe no player you’d rather have as part of the duo responsible for fixing the issue than the captain who is now, at 30, one of the older heads in the squad.
“We would have liked to have played better and had more of a connection,” Kane said on the eve of England’s last-16 game against Slovakia. “But I still feel like the movements are there. We’re moving really well and I thought it was a lot better than the first two games.”
Kane has had various attacking partners for England over the years and he pointed out that his and Bellingham’s relationship is still fairly new.
“Even though we have played a bit together there’s still things we can both do better,” Kane said. “We’re hoping that as the tournament goes on we grow more and more.”
At the Qatar World Cup, Kane had Mason Mount behind him, but Mount was dropped after two games and Southgate went 4-3-3. In Euro 2020, Southgate switched between playing a similar formation to this tournament, with Mount mainly the No 10, or 3-4-3 — which they played in the final — with Kane expected to gel more with wider forwards.
You probably have to go back to 2018 and the Russia World Cup to find Kane’s most effective No 10 partner for England when he formed a near telepathic understanding with Dele Alli, his team-mate at Tottenham Hotspur. Those days feel a lifetime ago.
The Kane-Bellingham partnership may, of course, have been impacted by Bellingham’s shift towards the left in the Slovenia game — to allow Phil Foden more time in the middle.
And it may have been affected by Bellingham’s overall decline from scorer and player of the match in the opening game to a player some pundits have called to be dropped.
Whatever the reason, it is still bonkers that two of England’s most exciting attacking talents have failed to combine well together.
“It isn’t the end of the world,” Kane said. “I know things are being heightened and there will be a lot of talk, but that’s part and parcel of playing for England in a major tournament.
“Jude has dealt with that unbelievably well for his age. He’s dealt really well with going to Real Madrid for his age.
“So there’s no worries about Jude. He’s a great guy, he believes in himself 100 percent and from both of our points of view we want to go out there and start stepping up our levels.
“I feel we’ve been ruthless on the defensive side, in terms of blocks and blocking crosses and winning balls and now it’s down to me, the attacking players and maybe the midfielders to maybe be a bit more ruthless in the final third of the pitch.”
Southgate also pointed out that it is easy to forget how young Bellingham is, given how old he appears on the pitch.
The England manager was reminded of quite how young Bellingham is when the squad sang “Happy Birthday” to him (and Eberechi Eze, with whom he shares a birthday) on his 21st birthday during a team meeting ahead of training on Saturday.
“Because of his maturity and the impact he’s had, we expect so much of him but we are singing happy birthday to him and Eberechi and we are reminding ourselves that these are very young men,” Southgate said.
“We’ve got a lot of young players in the team and they are performing on one of the biggest stages in world football and there are inevitably going to be days when you hit the heights and days when you don’t quite hit those heights but he’s a top player and he is fully motivated for the game.”
If they could reach even a fraction of the heights they manage at their clubs, it would be a good start.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/TskNPQ8
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