Gareth Southgate has offered a hint about the role Jordan Henderson will play for England in the Euro 2020 final.
The Liverpool captain is yet to start for his country at this summer’s European Championships, having only made his return from a groin injury on the eve of the tournament, but has impressed when coming on as a substitute in their last four outings.
West Ham’s Declan Rice and Leeds United’s Kalvin Phillips have impressed in his absence, despite not boasting the same experience as the Premier League and Champions League winner.
And Southgate weighed up the pros and cons of the duo retaining their places ahead of Henderson for the final, with England set to face their most challenging threat so far in the form of Italy, who boast Jorginho, Marco Verratti and Nicola Barella in midfield.
“You have to try and adapt the game to our strengths and try to highlight the potential weaknesses in the opponent,” the Three Lions boss told reporters. “There are fantastic players all through the Italy team, they have a good, tactical plan, an experienced coach and an amazing record over the last 30 games.
“We’re very aware of that but players like our two midfield players have played beyond their experience in this tournament and they’ve already played against Luka Modric and Toni Kroos so they’ve had to adapt to these type of midfield players with great European experience and they’ve done that brilliantly.
“We’re different. We have our own strengths and we have our own style of play which is geared towards the strengths of our own players.
“That is the beauty of football, every team has different strengths and we’ve tried to play to ours and adapt our game to our strengths. We need to do the same tomorrow.”
He continued: “There are benefits to having experience of big matches and sometimes there are benefits of it all being fresh and exciting and new.
“Declan and Kalvin in particular have adapted so well to that challenge. They’ve played against some outstanding midfield players in this competition and we’ve got trust in all of our players. That’s why we selected them.
“We’ve known that in any situation we’d be happy to put any of them on the field. We’ve put some really young players into matches that had a high profile, potentially with quite a lot of pressure and tension. They’ve all dealt with that really well.
“We’ve had some senior players coming back from injury who have contributed really importantly as well. This effort has been about the whole squad and that will continue into tomorrow.”
