If England don't want to be booed from the pitch, they'll need to do better than that
With a final preparation match that has caused more problems than it could ever have solved, England's preparation for Euro 24 feels surprisingly familiar.
It’s almost as though the Football Association have no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s the weekend before the European Championships and the mood surrounding the England team is discombobulated. At points, they look dreadful, as though they’ve only just met each other. But at others they still have it in them to look pretty good, as they did when demolishing Italy in the European Championship qualifier that just about everybody seems to have forgotten about.
If there’s one match that has come to represent not only England's men's football team in the 21st century, it was the 2-1 defeat to Iceland at Euro 2016. Four days earlier, the UK had voted to leave the European Union, the cultural moment that came to break this country completely. It was raining in England as a national team acting as though all they had to do was turn up at the stadium to win was beaten by a team which represented everything that they didn’t.
So, in this slightly febrile atmosphere, and in a country has been acting as though in the grips of a slow-motion mental breakdown more or less since that day in 2016, who did the FA, apparently high on their own hubris decide would be the perfect opponents to give the team their send-off to this summer’s Euros? You guessed it. And yes, these guests did decide to accept the open goal that had been set up in front of them. Sometimes, these storylines just write themselves.
The sound of booing ringing in their ears probably wasn’t what Gareth Southgate wanted to be the soundtrack from London as his team flies off to Germany for this summer’s tournament, but it’s difficult to imagine what other reaction might have been expected, considering the paucity of the England performance, coupled with the cost of getting tickets and the inconvenience of having to get to this particular stadium at this particular time.
Ticket prices for this match had been priced at £25 to £75 for adults, and getting to Wembley for 7.45 on a Friday evening is never a particularly pleasant task. Small wonder, then, that the crowd weren’t too happy to see half a performance from a scratch team that seldom looked like scoring over the entire course of the ninety minutes. It remains the case that football expects fans to just turn up and ‘support’, no matter how unappealing the glop they have on offer is in the first place.
Of course, there will be those who will argue that to lose such a match is good for tempering expectations, but that does feel like stretching for a silver lining. Quite aside from anything else, it hasn’t felt as though there have been particularly high expectations for them in the first place. Bookmakers have them as one of the favourites, but dissatisfaction with Southgate has been growing since losing the Euro 2020 final and only accelerated further with losing in the quarter-finals of the last World Cup to France.
What did the manager ‘learn’ from this match? That Aaron Ramsdale has suffered for a lack of game time at Arsenal this season? That there are limits to the superpowers of Phil Foden? That England can struggle against teams that pack the backend of their midfield and make passing through them difficult? It might even be suggested that, with nine days left until their first group match against Serbia, it’s a little late to still be trying to ‘learn’ new things about them now.
With half of the squad that went to the Middle East a year and a half ago not involved this time around, Southgate’s words are already coming back to haunt him, just a few days after he uttered them. This the ‘different’ England that we’d been promised then is it, Gareth? With John Stones picking up an injury, Harry Kane whacking the best chance of the evening wide of the post and the second half substitutes having no significant influence upon the game following their introduction, it’s difficult to believe that this is the sort of ‘different’ that anyone would want apart from their rivals.
So what was the purpose of all this? If the players did give any clues as to their current condition last night, it was probably that they’re shagged out. And an extra week to get a little bit of a break isn’t an option until they’ve been eliminated from the tournament, which is the one thing that the players seem to definitely need at the moment. Ah, come on now. Surely we all know by now that player wellbeing doesn’t matter in comparison with governing bodies making millions of pounds in gate receipts from squeezing every gap in the schedule until it’s completely colonised, don’t we?
While the idea that losing a match like this is somehow a good thing if you squint at it hard enough is clearly for the birds, this outcome has at least put the English back into their comfort zone of emotionally immature blubbering (some people seem to have started using the phrase ‘golden generation’ again, although it would seem that is primarily to hit Southgate over the head with rather than anything else), with the press stepping in with their weirdly racist fixation on Bukayo Saka the next morning, even though he’d only played 24 minutes of the game and was, frankly, no more or less effective than anyone else on the pitch.
So here we all are, then. It’s midsummer, the sky is clouding over, the racism is all ready to ratchet up a notch, and the team is malfunctioning, with people calling for the manager’s head nine days before they’re due to kick off their opening match, because that’s a tactic that would be certain to work. In other words, it feels at the moment as though normal service has returned to the England men at major tournaments. Whether we wanted that to be the case or not, it was always likely to return to this sort of mean.