There is perhaps a certain bitter comic timing in the fact that England’s next opponent is the country serially ranked as the happiest on earth. Prosperous, equal, well-educated, socially supported and with few delusions of global grandeur, Finland offers our own disgruntled and perennially troubled nation an abundance of useful life lessons, most of which you can guarantee will go unheeded.
And so to Helsinki, where Lee Carsley apparently has only three games left to save the job that was apparently his after two games, slipping away after three games, and which he does not actually appear to want anyway. Perhaps it was inevitable, given our evident lack of enthusiasm for the Nations League format in general, that English football would use this autumn lacuna as an opportunity to turn entirely in upon itself, to give full rein to its rolling psychodrama, an extended Lee In/Lee Out referendum campaign.
The first point to make is that for all the histrionic headlines that greeted Thursday night’s Wembley debacle, Ivan Jovanovic’s Greece side are actually quite a bit better than a Fifa world ranking of 48 would have you assume. This was, after all, a team that had been on a sharp upward curve for a while: drawing with France and outplaying Germany for large parts of a 2-1 friendly defeat just before the Euros.
According to the Elo ratings – a rolling and slightly more rigorous long-term measure of international performance – their triumph at Wembley actually lifted them into the world’s top 20, ahead of the likes of the United States, Mexico, Sweden and Morocco. The same system actually rates the current Greece as a better side than they were at the start of Euro 2004, a tournament they famously won.
Obviously you still expect England to beat them. On the pure measure of expected goals – 0.84 to 0.74 in England’s favour – this was not quite the spanking it felt like in real time, perhaps as a result of Greece’s three disallowed goals. But maybe this is a team actually worth according a certain respect, rather than a litany of bad puns and a team selection that reeked of imperial contempt.
Which brings us to a second, possibly counterintuitive point: England’s system on Thursday night was not so much a case of poor conception as poor execution. Throwing together all the good attacking players – with a plan, with proper drilling, with pressing and purpose and intensity and a grasp of the small details – this can actually work. You defend high and as a unit, pin the opposition into their own territory, starve them of the ball, suffocate them, and then cut them to pieces with creativity. But, of course, this is a tactic that requires more than 20 minutes of practice.
Clearly Carsley will get the bullets for this, and fair enough; it was a terrible display, explained terribly. But what was striking about England’s performance against Greece was not simply the incoherence but the lack of vigour and commitment. Pulling out of tackles. Allowing Greek players to dribble into dangerous areas with impunity. A lack of pressure on the man in possession.
Given the way England approached that game, there is arguably no system in the world that would have won it for them. That may also be on Carsley, but it is not purely a system issue, and it certainly goes back further than this autumn. Take a longer view and the Greece game was simply part of a wider pattern of staid, inchoate, borderline-illegible England performances in the past 12 months. Something feels rotten at the core of this squad, and in this context Thursday’s abortive celebrity extravaganza felt more like a logical progression than some wild anomaly.
You can see it in the positional indiscipline, a habit that surfaced during Euro 2024, like a surreal episode of Oprah. Harry Kane, you get to be No 10! Jude Bellingham, you get to be No 10! Phil Foden, you get to be No 10! You can see it in the insipid and erratic pressing, the unmodulated effort, the idea that tracking and covering is somebody else’s job. You can see it in the body language, which turns negative suspiciously quickly. And you could see it in Carsley’s selection, which felt like an attempt to keep all the stars happy, a sop to the officer corps, Roberto Martínez with even less authority.
Already there has been a slight but clear deference to the biggest clubs. Levi Colwill and Noni Madueke get fast-tracked while Eberechi Eze and Jarrod Bowen are sidelined. An undercooked Foden plays ahead of Ollie Watkins. Jack Grealish comes straight back in while James Maddison has to wait. Angel Gomes plays 90 good minutes against Finland and then no minutes against Greece.
There are, of course, long-term trends at work here. The squad Gareth Southgate took to Russia in 2018 had a grand total of one Champions League medal (belonging to Gary Cahill) and 11 Premier League titles between them. The current squad has eight Champions Leagues and 27 league titles (one in Spain). Higher standards; but also greater expectations, bigger egos, a subtly different calculus of where international football sits in their legacy.
For years the focus of England’s cultural development has been on how we can keep these guys happy, in an era where the rewards and prestige are ever more severely weighted towards club football. This was one of Southgate’s great achievements, and by the end even he seemed a little lost in the cosmos, desperately trying to keep the circus on the road, a cast of stars all convinced they were possessed of some unique main-character energy.
When it works, your stars step up at crucial moments to drag you to a major final you had no business being in. But the problem with this model is that effort becomes contingent on circumstances. Euro semi-final: fine. Uefa Nations League group B2 in October: good luck with that. Which is why a certain arrogance, a certain caprice, seems to have crept into the setup.
There is an old Finnish proverb: onnellisuus on se paikka puuttuvaisuuden ja yltäkylläisyyden välillä, which means “happiness is a place between scarcity and abundance”. For the last few years English football has enjoyed an abundance of talent and a scarcity of identity.
What they really need is a 2016-style cultural reboot, not the sad late-era Southgate but the insurgent early Southgate. A coach who could reassert control, slay a few sacred cows, reconnect the reality of playing for England with the idea of playing for England, imbue a sense of mission and purpose that goes beyond simply wanting to win something.
Most probably Carsley is not that guy. But then, who is? A big foreign coach such as Thomas Tuchel may deliver the required authority, but not the sense of meaning or the cultural change. Eddie Howe, Graham Potter, Steve Cooper: all good and all flawed in their various ways. The coach England need right now may not exist. There is a reason they called it the impossible job.
