The England manager has picked an inexperienced 30-man squad for the international triple-header. What will he learn?
In football, as in life, timing is everything. It is certainly no fault of Gareth Southgate’s that his England side must now take centre stage with last weekend’s riotously entertaining Premier League still fresh in the memory. Hurrah for international triple-header week, said no one ever; and yet the stakes for these three fixtures at a deserted Wembley – a friendly against Wales on Thursday, followed by Nations League games against Belgium on Sunday and Denmark on Wednesday – are considerable. Not simply for this emerging, amorphous England team, but for Southgate himself.
Outside major tournaments, the lot of the international manager is one of basic helplessness in the face of events. The player you fall in love with one game could get catastrophically injured before the next. The red-hot striker who was banging them in before Christmas might be enfeebled and exhausted by March. So little of your success is actually within your control, and yet even by those standards Southgate’s last 12 months have been a chastening lesson in just how quickly the mood music can shift.
Written by Jonathan Liew
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/oct/07/gareth-southgate-needs-to-find-solutions-for-unbalanced-england-side under the title “Gareth Southgate needs to find solutions for unbalanced England side | Jonathan Liew”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
