Last month Gareth Southgate did a long broadcast interview with the journalist Guillem Balagué. It kicked off with Balagué lobbing up a soft one, asking England’s manager what album he would choose to keep if he
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Rather than just doing the decent thing and saying, yeah, I listen to Drake in the car, Southgate went on to talk – for absolutely ages – about how lucky he was to have been in so many dressing rooms, to have been exposed to different kinds of music, different genres and cultures.
“Yes OK, but what album?” Guillem cut in, not giving it
http://www.officialpanthersfootballstore.com/Trai_Turner_Jersey up. “Well,” Gareth mused, dwelling a bit more on his recent experience of new music through the younger generation, how varied the cultural palate is, how diverse and multilayered, before concluding, “I guess I’d have to say The Joshua Tree by U2.”
As moments of endearingly David Brent-style comedy go, this made for a good start to an interesting interview. But it also seemed to
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Or perhaps not. Gareth and The Joshua Tree also came to mind, briefly, as the team for Friday night’s friendly against the Netherlands was announced. The current England squad is a mixed affair, with plenty of outsiders, form horses, and many who have reached this level via the road less travelled. Could it be that England really are
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In the event the opposite happened in Amsterdam. This was instead a Joshua Tree of a team, compromised entirely of mainstream, platinum-selling parts. All 10 outfield players were drawn
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http://www.goldenstatewarriorsauthentic.com/Womens-David-West-Jersey in the last 16 of the Champions League. Every player had spent some part of his youth at a Premier League-or-equivalent academy. Only two Englishman over the age of 27 touched the ball all night.
There has been an understandable urge to play down the import of a 1-0 win away to a poor Dutch team, who had only three Champions League players of their own on the pitch. Two years ago England beat the world champions and the current European champions as part of their preparations for being humiliated by Iceland at the European Championship.
But there are also times when credit is due for the methodology as much as the endgame. This was in its own way a process realised, a case of Peak Gareth. Win or lose, this team puts to the test the structures and tactics incubated at St George’s Park, via Premier League academies and Southgate’s own under-21 group.
There were plenty of coherent elements. It was striking to hear Ronald Koeman, who knows a bit about elite winning teams, say that England had been more comfortable on the ball. It is a significant cultural shift, and a genuine departure after decades spent watching England teams for whom the ball has so often appeared to be square.
Southgate has instead dropped established international players he feels lack the necessary technical ease to enact his plan of attritional possession from back to front. It would have been easier not to do this, easier not to put Kyle Walker, a player more used to having the ball at his feet, in his back three.
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