Looking back at England’s quietly effective 1-0 victory in Estonia, and indeed Jack Wilshere’s fine performance as the ball-playing queen bee in that muscular funnel of a central midfield, it is first necessary to issue the relevant disclaimers. Estonia are not just another weak opponent. They are a weakened weak opponent. This is a nation of one million people whose de facto national sport was basketball until 1991, and who at the Lillekula Stadium fielded a 21-year-old home-based left-back with one previous cap and a right-back who was released by Lierse in May and has not played a proper club match since.
And yet for all the slightly apologetic sense of perspective, and indeed the basic devaluation of this stage of competition by Uefa’s dunder-headed expansion plans, it would also be wrong to allow the best parts of England’s third successive Euro 2016 qualifying win to slip past unexamined.
Most notable was Wilshere’s display of soft-touch playmaking in his new withdrawn pivot role, a performance that also raises plenty of questions, albeit mainly quite helpful ones.
For a start, should the mediocrity of the opposition rule out the suggestion, already made, that Wilshere has found his best position for England? Or has he simply found his best position against mediocre opposition? Four years on from his England debut, there is genuine encouragement to be taken from the cautious sense of fluidity – these things are relative – in Hodgson’s current Jack-based midfield, which is geared to getting the most of the qualities that first made him a rarity in English football.
Not so much those red-herring forward bursts, but his ability to receive and pass the ball under pressure and introduce a little clarity at the heart of the team where, so often in the past, the England midfield has seemed to be playing a different game to the rest of the world, a strange mix of high-rev panic passes and periods of enervating sideways caution.
Wilshere was famously dismissed as a midfield conductor three years ago by Pep Guardiola, who suggested the Barcelona academy was stuffed full of similar players. This may or may not be the case. But Wilshere is still England’s best shot at this, the dinky little ball-playing fulcrum we’ve got, not to mention a player who is clearly keen to expand his range of skills.
“I’m starting to enjoy it a lot more,” he said after Sunday’s victory. “The Switzerland game was my first game [playing there] and I’m just getting better. I feel a lot more comfortable and I’ve been watching a few players, like Xabi Alonso, who’s probably the best in the world there now, and learning, as I don’t play the role for my club side. I’ve watched [Andrea] Pirlo before but now for me it’s Xabi Alonso.
“ When I watch the videos the main thing that stands out for me is their footballing intelligence. You can still go off on a little run there but you have to remember if you lose the ball the team will be in trouble, whereas if I lose the ball a bit higher there’s players around me to recover the ball.”
England may not quite have minted their own Alonso just yet, but there are some intriguing aspects to that narrow, hustling diamond. It is at least something different: placing their best manipulator of the ball at the heart of the team, rather than fixating on moments of explosion, cinematically raking passes, or goals scored out of a moment of tempo-raising thrust.
It is also a good thing for Wilshere who is not, it now seems fair to say, a player who specialises in the final pass or the final touch. To date he has no goals and one assist in 23 appearances for England. Instead his most impressive skills lie elsewhere, notably on Sunday in the range of his passing, which saw him nudge the ball short distances, switch tempo or direction with a longer pass, and on several occasions produce a delicate dink forward into the smallest space.
The diamond itself is yet to convince completely. In Tallinn with eight midfielders contesting a narrow swathe of unmanicured pitch, England often looked far too narrow. In this system they are essentially playing a pair of defensive midfielders on the flanks, with Fabian Delph and Jordan Henderson employed as muscular wing men. And yet even here there are some benefits. Henderson’s best quality is not his defensive positioning, but his mobility and energy, and in this sense the wider role makes some sense.
Plus, a major issue with England’s midfield at successive tournaments has been a sense of slackness, allowing the kind of players Wilshere likes to study on YouTube to inflict their own kind of slow-burn agony by keeping possession and striking when the space appears. A genuine test of England’s latest tactical plan, and the diamond’s ability to close these spaces, will have to take place outside the current B-List qualifying campaign. But for now, and with Wilshere to the fore at their rear, they do, at least, have one.
