Full-time: France 3-2 England
First and foremost, France proved that they have some wonderful young players. Dembele and Mbappe were spectacular, and Pogba dominated midfield. There were not many pluses for England: Sterling, Trippier, Bertrand and Butland did reasonably well and the first goal, scored by Kane, was tasty. But the system malfunctioned and, more importantly, too many players were sloppy and, all in all, didn’t look worthy of being on the same pitch as their opponents, most obviously Oxlade-Chamberlain, Dier and Stones. Most damningly, England didn’t have the wit or strength of mind to take advantage when Varane was sent off: they didn’t have a clue how to make the most of the extra space and were gradually overwhelmed by a sense of shame. Once France sensed that, England were doomed.
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90+3 mins: Wonderful again from Dembele, who really is a gem! Another foxy run bewilders England, and Dembele then slices them open with a careful pass to his co-conspirator, Mbappe. Butland does well, rushing off his line to save the low shot.
90+1 min: Another England mistake - another Oxlade-Chamberlauin mistake - gifts the ball to Dembele, of all people. France then start to toy with England in the English box, with Dembele and Pogba trying to shimmy their way into a shooting position. England muster enough self-respect and competence to crowd them out.
France substitution: Jallet on, Sidibe off.
87 min: Sterling suddenly belives he’s a goleador so tries to find the net from 25 yards. With hilarious consequences.
85 min: Mbappe and Dembele are simply too fast, too clever and too skilful for England’s defence, who, it must be said, are getting scant protection from central midfield, where Oxlade-Chamberlain and Dier have been overrun.
84 min: England, with an extra man, seem to be holding on for a 3-2 defeat.
England substitution: Creswell on, Jones off. Walker will go to left-back. But it’s going to take a helluva lot more than that for England to get back into this. They’ve come apart since gaining a numerical advantage, as if they couldn’t cope with the pressure of being expected to create and win.
78 min: England tried and failed to play their way out from the back, as Dier wafted a silly pass in the general direction of a team-mate and Lemar cuts it out easily. Then the French rip forward to exact punishment, Pogba feeding Mbappe, who receives the ball with his back to goal before laying it back to Dembele, who finishes expertly from 16 yards.
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France 3-2 England (Dembele 78)
The Dortmund forward grabs his first international goal and he deserves it because he’s been brilliant. But it all came from an England blunder.
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76 min: Theresa May has just joined in a Mexican wave. Who are you calling Maybot?
England substitution: Lallana on, Trippier off. Tripper has had a good debut but makes way so that England can change to a back four, with Jones at right-back and Walker still on the left.
75 min: Sterling shows tremendous strength and savviness to shunt Lemar off the ball before scurrying down the right and into the box. He tries to pick out Kane but France scramble the ball away.
73 min: Lallana is warming up.
68 min: Chaos in the English defence as Kante beats Oxlade-Chamberlain to a loose ball and nudges it on to Mbappe. The striker puts a defender and Butland down with a sharp feint ... but then clanks the ball off the crossbar from 10 yards! Cahill then clears the follow-up off the line!
66 min: Pogba tricks his way brilliantly past Cahill but fails to find a decisive final ball. Moments later Dembele thrills the crowd again by scorching past Walker, who has never looked so slow. But Dembele also fails to find a final ball, donking it straight to Jones, who has been the best of England’s three central defenders.
65 min: Pogba instigates another attack. Dembele takes the ball with his back to goal about 25 yards out, then wriggles free and slips the ball through to Mbappe. Butland charges off his line to stop the young striker from getting a shot off!
63 min: Lemar clips a freekick from 35 yards towards the English penalty spot. Koscielny tries to flick it backwards towards goal but it trickles wide. Butland still hasn’t had a shot to save or, indeed, to parry into the path of an opponent as a tribute to Heaton.
62 min: Pogba - who has been outstanding - wins the ball off Kane in midfield and then turns and pings an incisive pass forward towards Mbappe. Stones pulls the striker backed and gets a deserved booking.
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60 min: The tempo of the game has slowed, as 10-man France sit back and challenge England to show enough ingenuity to open them up.
58 min: Dier goes long towards Sterling, who competes for it in the air with Umtiti at the edge of the area. And Sterling wins it, which tells you everything you need to know about Barcelona’s approach to the recruitment of centrebacks.
57 min: Dembele nutmegs Kane on half-way, bringing yelps of glee from the home crowd.
55 min: England play Walker into space down the left. Unsurprisingly he has to turn back on to his right foot so eschews the cross. But he wins a corner, at least. Kante clears Trippier’s in-swinger.
53 min: Sterling skins Digne brilliantly before being taken out. Sterling has probably been England’s best player so far, the only blemish being that moment in the first half when he wasted a chance to score because he didn’t have confidence in his ability to do so. That’s a vicious circle that needs to broken.
France substitution: Koscielny on, Giroud off.
52 min: Trippier delivers a corner as they bid to take advantage of their numerical superiority. Pogba heads it away.
50 min: This time Lloris does save from a Tottenham team-mate, clasping the ball to his chest after a header by Alli following an English corner.
GOAL! France 2-2 England (Kane pen 48)
Kane fires straight down the middle past his Tottenham team-mate, Lloris! Game on.
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PENALTY TO ENGLAND! RED CARD FOR VARANE!
Alli flicks the ball on with his head and then cases it himself, to the surprise of the French defence. He gets the wrong side Varane, who clips him and is sent off!
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46 mins: As expected, Jack Butland starts the second half in place of Heaton. Walker is also coming on, for Bertrand, and will play as a left wing-back. Let’s see how good he is at turning back before cross.
Miss the Don’t Look Back in Anger performance at the start? Le voici:
Half-time: France 2-1 England
England ignited the fun with a dainty goal but are now deservedly behind. France have cut through them too easily, at times streaming through central midfield, and also down the left a lot. England have not been comfortable in the back three - especially Stones - and they look weak in central midfield, where Dier and Oxlade-Chamberlain are being bypassed often. Understandably this friendly is not being at full-throttle but France look, on top of everything else, faster and physically more robust.
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44 min: Sterling goes down in the box after catching the foot of Umtiti, who kind of wafted it in his general direction. Good example of when contact does not amount to a foul.
43 min: That really was a lovely flourish from Dembele, who has been finding a lot of space between England’s defence and midfield but hadn’t done much with it until a moment ago. This time he darted forward, played a one-two and dummied past Cahill before getting of the shot that Heaton parried. Sidibe was one of two French players who could have slotted in the rebound, as they overran the English defence.
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France 2-1 England (Sidibe 42)
A brilliant run by Dembele, followed by a good save by Heaton, but Sidibe bangs in the rebound from close range!
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39 min: Pogba collects the ball in midfield and figures its only a summertime friendly so he might have a bit of fun. His shot from 40 yards sails into the stands.
36 min: Brilliant pass by Trippier! He wrongfooted the entire French defence by volleying a pass to Sterling when everyone was expecting him to take a touch to control Dier’s looping pass. Sterling receives the pass 10 yards out and with a clear shot of goal ... but he has absolutely no conviction that he can score so he instead manoeuvres himself into a more difficult position and tries to cross to Kane. That gives France time a precious second to regroup and clear. Sterling, so good in most respects, really has to sharpen up around goal.
33 min: England corner. Cahill peels off Varane to win the header at the back post, then cushions it shrewdly down to Dier. The Spurs man swivels eight yards out and fires off a first-time shot, which whizzes inches wide!
31 min: France sweep forward, with Kante feeding Lemar who helps it on to Mbappe at the left-hand corner of England’s box. The striker shuffles forward and then feints his way past Trippier, who was totally taken in. Mbappe then tries to beat Heaton at the near post but the keeper turns the low drive away. Mbappe might have been better advised going for the far corner.
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29 min: Oxlade-Chamberlain needs to improve. He hasn’t had much influence in central midfield and has given the ball away a couple of times.
27 min: Stones lets the ball run away from him at the right-hand corner of the England box. Dembele accepts the present and tries to tee up Giroud, but his pass is misplaced.
25 min: France are starting to boss this. They’re stronger, tidier and more inventive in possession.
23 min: Southgate won’t be happy with the way England conceded that goal. France lofted a freekick into the area and Giroud won it easily (Cahill was yards off him), forcing a decent save from Heaton - low to his right with one hand - before Umtiti netted on the follow-up.
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GOAL! France 1-1 England (Umtiti 22)
Umtiti slams it into the net from close range after Heaton parries a towering header from Giroud!
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France substitution: Digne on, Mendy off.
19 min: A pause in play so Mendy can receive treatment.
17 min: France have responded well to falling behind and are starting to stretch England. Mbappe was barely seen in the first 10 minutes but is starting to get more involved.
15 min: Mbappe gets free for the first time thanks to a crafty pass by Pogba. The Monaco youngster flies down the left, with Jones floundering in his wake. Then Mbappe feeds Dembele, who runs on to it to shoot first time from the edge of the area. But he guides the ball wide, much to the relief of England!
12 min: An outburst of clapping for Pogba in recognition of a sumptuous piece of control. Moments later Giroud hammers a volley into the net from 15 yards ... but it’s ruled out for offside.
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GOAL! France 0-1 England (Kane 9)
That’s a smart goal! It may have started with France giving the ball away cheaply but England punished them with panache. Alli floated a ball over from the right to Sterling, who took it down in the box before waiting for Bertrand to arrive on the overlap. Then Sterling played in Bertrand with a back-heel and the Southampton man fired low across the six-yard box, leaving Kane to apply the finish.
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5 min: Mendy gets up a gallop down the left but Jones keeps his eye on the ball and steps in to nick it off the rampaging full-back.
2 min: Oxlade-Chaberlain plays a slack pass in his own half, offering the ball back to France. Lemar then looks up as if aiming a cross towards the back post from the left, but he catches the ball very weirdly and it swerves and dips in a highly unusual way and risks embarrassing Heaton. But the keeper keeps his eye on it and bats it away at the near post and then rushes out to pick it up. That was a horrible test to face so early on his first international start but the Burnley keeper did what he had to do.
1 min: England kick off. They work it quickly forward to Alli wide on the left but he can’t get in a cross.
A minute’s silence is observed impeccably in honour of the victims of those attacks in Manchester and London.
One gendarme is on the pitch with an electric guitar and surrounded by a brass band: they launch into a version of Don’t Look Back in Anger and it’s upliftingly amusing so lots of people sing along with it. That’s followed by La Marseillaise and God Save the Queen.
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For unspecified reasons there will be a five-minute delay to kickoff, so it’ll be at 8.05pm UK time.
Pre-match pep-talk from Southgate
Asked what he wants to see from his team today, Southgate says: “Slightly better us of the ball [than against Scotland], a bit more composure and a little bit ore patience Quicker ball circulation … and a little bit ore quality in the final third ... We have quite a young side out but so do France. We want to make a statement with the way we play.”
Kieran Trippier’s England debut promises to be a testing one, as he’ll be up against Benjamin Mendy and Thomas Lemar, who were swashbuckling down the left for Monaco throughout last season. Lemar has been included at the expense of Dimitri Payet, whose been shoddy for France in recent matches so his place is up for grabs there.
Two points of order:
1) Video assistant referee will be available for this game, the first time ever for a senior England international. So if the balls crashes down off the underside of the bar, we won’t have to spend the next 50 years arguing about whether it went over the line.
2) There’ll be a pre-match tribute to the people killed and hurt during the recent attacks in Manchester and London. Presumably there’ll be a mood of respect, solidarity and optimism, as there was when these countries last met, which was at Wembley a few days after a murderous attack in Paris. For more on the tribute, which will inclue a rendition of Oasis’ Don’t Look Back in Anger, see this:
TEAMS
Southgate makes six changes to the side that lined out against England, with Trippier and Bertrand at wing-bakcs in a 3-4-3 scheme.
France: Lloris; Sidibé, Varane, Umtiti, Mendy; Dembélé, Kanté, Pogba, Lemar; Giroud, Mbappé
Subs: Areola, Jallet, Kimpembe, Griezmann, Payet, Matuidi, Rabiot, Digne, Sissoko, Lacazette, Koscielny, Tolisso, Zouma, Thauvin, Costil.
England: Heaton; Jones, Stones, Cahill; Trippier, Dier, Alli, Bertrand; Sterling, Kane, Oxlade-Chamberlain
Subs: Butland, Walker, Cresswell, Gibson, Smalling, Livermore, Defoe, Lallana, Rashford, Lingard, Forster, Hart.
Referee: Davide Massa (Italy)
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Preamble
Hello and welcome to a last tango in Paris before the players of England and France get off on their holidays. End-of-season friendlies tend not to set the pulses racing but this one has the potential to be interesting, at least. That’s not a guarantee, mind. But look at it this way: in almost exactly one year both of these countries will probably head to Russia with high hopes of winning the World Cup so it’s about time they started getting their acts together, right?
Neither has been in encouraging form lately. France, indeed, are coming off the back of last Friday’s silly defeat in Sweden, which has jeopardised their World Cup qualification plans and raised the stakes of their next qualifier, against Holland at the end of August. They’ve made things difficult for themselves and Didier Deschamps is a manager under fire. He’s been in charge for five years without ever really giving the impression that he has what it takes to get the best out of an exceptional array of attacking players, even if he did take them bumbling to the final of Euro 2016. France have often looked clunky and unbalanced and the manager is expected to use today’s game to look for answers. Whether he can recognise answers when he sees them is another matter.
Gareth Southgate, of course, has been in charge of England for a far shorter time. Using the evidence of the seven matches that he’s overseen since that weird Sam Allardyce interlude, including Saturday’s fare at Hampden Park, you’d struggle to build an ironclad argument that Southgate will deliver more success than Roy Hodgson. But he’s still experimenting with personnel and formations and trying to stretch players’ minds and strengthen their confidence. Sometimes there may be a whiff of hooey about it all but these are early days so let’s cut the man some slack. Besides, he doesn’t seem to care what the critics say, and that’s a step forward right here. Today his process is supposed to continue in Paris, where several players, notably Tom Heaton and (in the second half) Jack Butland, will get a chance to make claims for more regular action.
Overall, then, the simple slogan for today is: Let’s see what these guys can do.
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