Stairway to madness

England are so boring they've broken a nation of brains.

This is Editor’s Take: during EURO2024, home of the SCOUTED team’s quick-fire thoughts on the tournament as it happens.

Declan Rice stares into the camera. There’s a warm defiance about him - he smiles wryly at every question, as if amused by their absurdity. The squad try to avoid the rhetoric, he says, as the rhetoric is repeated straight at him. There’s a shine to his eyes, which might be a result of ITV’s intense lighting, or perhaps the trace of barely concealed, passionate frustration. He breaks into a laugh when asked if the squad are fit. What is this guy talking about?

In a vacuum, his befuddlement is understandable. He is, after all, weeks out from a stunning campaign which placed him, without much argument, amongst the best midfielders on the planet. Many of his teammates can say the same. Twitter will disagree, because these guys are all secretly overrated, of course, and I am very smart - but most can see this England side represents a truly staggering collection of talent.

Stitch that talent together, unleash it upon the 57th best-ranked team in the world, and what do you get? 0.8 xG.

I am a weird guy, so I thought a lot about the shine in Rice’s eyes as I watched his team try to break down a rigid Slovenian block. As John Stones, a year removed from winning an historic treble in the most technically demanding midfield in the world, lets the ball bobble over his foot and out of play, I wonder: is the shine of the studio lights too bright? Or is it passion overriding his quality? There were a bunch of touches like this: messy, clumsy, panicked. The spectre of England’s two-day war with the media seemed to loom large.

My silly metaphors do not often make for smart analysis, and the answer to England’s ails is probably much more simple. They are, as Grace Robertson wrote, “a collection of individuals just doing their own thing” - I described it as a kind of footballing austerity, where the top 1% are unshackled under the promise their brilliance will trickle down and enrich the whole. As has been proven in the country at large, unfettered individualism is no substitute for a collective system.

Hilariously, Gareth Southgate’s answer to such criticism was to start Conor Gallagher in midfield, ostensively to improve England’s press. Perhaps he’d forgotten that pressing happens when you don’t have the ball, and England had it for 68% of time Gallagher was on the pitch. He contributed 17 accurate passes. He seemed to be under instruction to move high into the right half-space and pin back Slovenia’s midfield, which is a smart way to use an eight when the six behind him is the best in the world at mopping up whatever escapes. Or it would be, if Gallagher had the guile to operate amongst such congestion.

Instead, England ignored him and went left, over and over again. Either Slovenia’s shape shuttled them this way or Southgate’s (again, very funny) response to the left-hand-side criticism was to massively overcompensate. Jude Bellingham drifted into that channel to combine with Phil Foden and Kieran Trippier, forming neat triangles which consistently ended with Trippier knocking the ball back to Marc Guehi. As Jake W. Fox put it, “mighty impressive for England to be horseshoeing in the middle third.” Midway through the half, Trippier began to play five-yard passes with his left foot, as if just to prove he could.

The black hole Gallagher represented meant Bukayo Saka was almost completely phased out. England’s best moment came when Gallagher made the 1 (one) single ‘Ben White’ run of the game, allowing Saka the space to dribble inside and drag Slovenia out of shape. Please excuse my Arsenal glasses, but Saka’s gravity is such that it utterly discombobulates even the most settled defences. Slovenia hurriedly shifted their pieces to stop him and opened an acre in the left half-space, into which Rice drifted, as if he knew it’d be there. His pass found Foden, Foden found Saka, Saka tapped in. Offside.

It was a bruising reminder of what happens when individuals just do stuff to unlock the best elements of other individuals. Y’know, like in a team sport.

England were marginally better in the second half. Conor Gallagher, fresh from 45 minutes of being screamed at by Kyle Walker, made way for Kobbie Mainoo. His job was the same: sit high on the right and stitch together England’s wide play. Mainoo’s quite good at this, who would’ve known. He waltzed over to wherever play was fiercest and knitted things together - he has that youthful, one-touch confidence required to kill such stubborn blocks. Most of the good stuff involved him. Cole Palmer and Anthony Gordon were introduced late - Gordon was given 80 seconds to do his thing, which turned out to be - again, surprise - width and speed. Palmer’s ingenuity was immediately on display, but it was too late.

The damage had been done - not to England’s standing in the group, but to the dwindling lifespan of everyone watching. 90 minutes closer to death, my friends. You’re welcome.

The discourse has been, expectedly, atrocious. You could fill a trophy cabinet with the worst football takes you’ve ever seen from the reaction to this game alone - even excluding anything with less than 15k likes.

Particularly galling were the attacks on Ian Wright, who dared to suggest Bukayo Saka be moved to left-back. It’s difficult, I understand, to accept moving England’s best player out of position. It’s even worse when it’s to include the star player of a London rival, who’s insufferable online fans are really…well, insufferable.

But I think of Kieran Trippier’s right foot and how it wasted both a Ballon d’Or contender and the Premier League’s Player of the Year. Imagine those triangles with Saka on the touchline, his pass-and-move, his ability to collapse space and time atop him and unlock the brilliance of others. I’d rather that was the brilliance of Phil Foden than Conor Gallagher, personally. The instinct that Saka would be doing more defending than attacking is false; England’s side of the draw means they will have claim to having better players in every game until the final. There is no reason, other than it’s England, lads, to put together a modern, possession-dominant system akin to those that have brutalised the Premier League. It’s what these players do every single week of the year. I know it’s hard to remember, but England should be better than almost everyone. Lean into it, with force.

Once, the idea that a national team should reflect the best sides in its domestic league was popular. This England squad is built on a spine of Manchester City and Arsenal, but both club’s tactics are absent. The players are there, but the will and ingenuity to assemble them properly is not. And they won’t be until England are knocked out and Southgate calls his time. It’s not that hard, for god’s sake. Bring in some width, get the press right, trap them in the final third, overload one side then switch…

Oh no.

I’ve been sat here, aimlessly smashing keys for two hours, and have wandered into becoming exactly what I hate. The armchair tactician comes for us all. Even now I am resisting the urge to describe how my perfect England system would work, channelling Arsenal and City in possession and out, with eights pinning opponents and Rice mopping up, Saka pushing high, Stones pushing high, Walker sweeping, Wharton dictating, Jude combining with the world’s best number nine…

Please stop. This is England. We know how it’ll look: just put the boys together and let them play. All this pontificating will do nothing to stop the onrushing doom of losing a penalty shootout to Ronald Koeman.

My aim, when I write about football, is usually to capture a tone: what is the story these men wrote on the pitch today? What is everyone feeling but cannot elucidate? I’m not an analyst and have no interest in being one - unless it’s England, apparently. But perhaps the tone I’ve captured here, completely by accident, is the overwhelming instinct to add your own trophy to that cabinet of shit. To shine a light directly into Declan Rice’s eyes so brightly he can’t help but laugh when you produce the most asinine opinion imaginable. To be part of the problem.

This is testament to just how frustrating Southgate’s systems are: they cannot help but unlock the big-brained thinker in all of us. Even those with very small brains, like me.

Against Slovenia, England’s superstars were so boring they’ve driven everyone mad. And perhaps, when the dust settles on this tournament and Southgate’s reign, that will be his legacy. For all the glorious days his individualism has produced, they have been little but flashes of stimulation, rewards for hours of staring at a screen. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in thrown beer, splattered across the roof of Boxpark. Perhaps they should start showing Subway Surfers alongside England games.

Southgate has united a nation in the warm embrace of madness. Millions of broken, exhausted brains are crying out for progressive change. They won’t get it. So it’s back to googling ‘line-up builder’, folks. Let me see those W-M formations. The Rice-Foden-Palmer midfields. Harry Kane on the bench? Even better. Oh yeah. That’s the good stuff.

Thanks for reading. If you’re enjoying our EURO coverage - whether it’s proper analysis from Llew and Steve, or whatever the hell this is - drop a like. It helps us know that people are out there actually, and we’re not just screaming into a void.

And - oh, go on then. Let us know what you’d do to fix England by leaving a comment. I can’t help it.