Here we go again. Time to fire up the sirens, unfurl the St George Cross flag and rattle off once more on the charabanc of doomed hope and certain despair. The Gareth Southgate England era has at least been notable for its ability to cut straight to the point. This is already the first England reign to begin rather than simply end with an ashen-faced apology, Southgate spending those first few weeks looking sad and saying sorry for all that stuff with Big Sam, Iceland and pretty much everything else for the last 50 years or so.
Six months on the games against Germany in Dortmund and Lithuania at Wembley do at last feel like the start of something. This is for one thing a genuinely Southgate England squad, with eight changes – albeit half through injury – from the make-do-and-mend job against Malta in October.
It is a remarkable squad in other ways, most notably as another point of departure the dawning in earnest of England’s post-Wayne world. With Germany next up it is perhaps worth recalling the last competitive game against the same opponents, the devastating 4-1 defeat at the 2010 World Cup. Imagine being told that afternoon it would take almost seven years to winkle the last and defining element of that slow-motion England team out of the starting XI.
In a brilliant twist Jermain Defoe’s recall, aged 34, keeps that thread alive. But in reality, with the passing of Rooney as an automatic pick, that particular era of stalled promise is now decisively dead.
Leaving us with what exactly? The second remarkable thing about this run-of-the-mill England squad is how run-of-the-mill it really is. It could be suggested, no doubt unfairly, that there has never been a less starry, more junior-officer group of England players. This is no bad thing in itself. Starriness, or rather the illusion of starriness, has been a major source of confusion for successive England eras but it is worth dwelling on this if only to note the numbers, the genuine downshift in face value.
Only one player in the England squad, Jamie Vardy, is still involved in the Champions League. This compares with nine in Germany’s original squad for this match, seven in the France squad, seven for Portugal and 12 for Spain. Only eight of this (depleted) England squad are in line to play in next season’s competition. Most astonishingly of all, only five of these England players have won the league title in their own country – or any country – and only Vardy and Gary Cahill in the last four seasons.
This is more than just a wider plateauing out. For the first time in a very long time – and perhaps to some relief – there is also no obvious star, no unfortunate hopeful on which to pin the giddiest hopes of a nation, a lineage stretching back through Rooney, Owen-Beckham-Gerrard, Shearer, Gascoigne, Lineker and Keegan that has now decisively stalled.
Raheem Sterling is perhaps the marquee name in this group, a good player but also a work in progress. Dele Alli is probably the most valuable on the open market. France’s new call-ups include Kylian Mbappé, Benjamin Mendy and Tiemoué Bakayoko: the flower of young European talent. Their equivalents in this England squad are Jake Livermore, Nathan Redmond and James Ward-Prowse – all worthy players but the point is made. This is not a collection of elite domestic footballers. Never mind the golden generation, meet the Beige Brigade.
At which point it is perhaps time to clench the handbrake, perform a furious U-turn and emit a huge bracing sigh of relief. Let’s face it, an England team without world stars is in reality nothing new. An England team who know they do not have any stars, a realistically geared group of players willing to work and grow as a collective: this could at least be interesting.
If nothing else sport will always offer endless opportunities for hope. In this case it is the chance to do things a little differently. The one real lesson of the Rooney Years and beyond was the basic fallacy of seeing any team as a collection of star individuals. Starting in Germany and then at Wembley against Lithuania, a relatively downbeat England team now have the chance to reject the star system, to seek to perform instead as a set of working complementary parts.
It may lack real headliners but this is a balanced and interesting group of players, not to mention for Southgate some malleable human clay. Fifteen squad members have fewer than 15 caps apiece. Defoe aside, nobody’s got past five goals. In Adam Lallana, Ali, Ross Barkley, Sterling and Eric Dier there are hard-working, talented midfielders in this group. Southgate’s energies should be focused entirely on trying to find a balance and a system, to foster the will to play solely for one another.
He probably also needs to stop apologising. Much was made this week of the England manager’s rousing speech to his players about the past, during which he dwelt on the past, flagged up the failings of the past, and insisted that what England really needed was a vinegary and astringent breath of manly reality, the strength to confront their own generational awfulness. “That drives me on as much as anything,” Southgate said. “The need to start recognising where we really are.”
The fact is everybody should know where England are by now. Iceland in Nice. That really happened. It would be another mistake to over-dramatise the belated recognition of mediocrity, to swing too far into recovery mode. English football has always been burdened by the feeling the national team needs to “mean” something, to be either thrillingly potent, thrillingly thwarted or thrillingly poor. “I think obviously we want to be the best in the world,” Ward-Prowse said this week, falling even now into that reflexive attitude, a bizarre oscillation between self-loathing and self-aggrandisement.
Whereas in reality England are not the worst but not the best, competent middle-rankers. In their favour international football itself is a relatively simply game. Never mind complete cultural shift at every level. Chemistry, team building and a simple game plan: these are the base components of any successful team and the most obvious elements that have been lacking.
Beyond this the wider challenge is simply to make people care again. Increasingly the reaction to international week among younger football fans is baffled disappointment. England, whose soundtrack is that horribly enervating bass drum, have become a drain, a source of weariness. The real task for Southgate’s brigade of equals, starting in Germany, is to build a team who play for once beyond their own levels; and in doing so communicate, rather than the usual angst and fear, a basic sense of joy in the process.
