The England XI Problem (Part 1/4)
Who would want to be Gareth Southgate? Or who wouldn't for that matter?
This summer, to add to a jam-packed season you’d be strained to fit anymore games into, during a pandemic, we get to top it off with even more football.
This summer’s Euro’s are still a bit up in the air. Location? It could be all across a pandemic-ridden Europe, or just in the UK, or in just parts of said-pandemic written Europe. Should we do it at all? Probably not to be brutally honest.
And yet, here we are.
Exhausted players, demanding corporate sponsors, and an incompetent UEFA, the whole Super League nonsense.
And caught in the middle of it all are the players and managers, which is my segue into Gareth Southgate and England. For the first time in my living memory, England have a very specific problem. Not the usual vacuum of talent, but the complete opposite.
Too much.
England are too good.
Who’d have thought? Not I!
Which leads me to throwing my hate into the ring for adding to the ongoing debate around the selection, because there isn’t really a position we don’t have at least a couple of good players.
So this newsletter starts with the keeper, next, defence, midfield, then attack.
Goalkeeper
Options: Pickford, Henderson, Pope.
Pope: Short answer. No.
This may be a surprising answer because the Burnley keeper is basically very good. Undeniably so. His (if you hate data look away now) PSxG-GA (basically boiled down to how likely the keeper is to stop the shot) is 89 - this means he’s in the top 11% of keepers in terms of shot-stopping across the big 5 mens leagues in Europe.
This is good.
In 29 games, Pope’s conceded 34 goals. He’s had the most shots against him of all our three, but it’s worth pointing out he’s probably consistently had the worse defence.
The data demonstrates a very high save percentage (92%) and a very good clean sheet percentage over 33%. This speaks to a good solid keeper who’s been key in keeping Burnley out of the relegation zone with a not really that good defence in front of him. On top of that he’s one of the very best keepers at defending against crosses, and at launching attacks with long range passes.
Which perhaps is the problem.
I have waxed lyrical about his strengths, but watching Pope play for England and you see why he isn’t the right fit for it. England, like many teams at the moment but crucially not Burnley, play out the back. When trying to play out the back, Pope looked panicky and uncomfortable with the ball at his feet. For Burnley he simply isn’t doing this, and it shows. Which is a problem, the keeper is the anchor point of a team trying to play out the back, they add another outlet for the defence, and very often a way out of trouble. But without that, without a solid and confident keeper to pass back, the playing out the back really doesn’t work. and within England’s system, Pope just doesn’t fit, regardless of how good a shot stopper he is.
Ask Joe Hart, who pretty suffered the same problem.
Henderson: Short answer. Maybe/probably but no.
The Man United keeper would probably be a probably had he gone out on loan this season. But, because he chose to stay and challenge De Gea for the No.1 spot, he’s played seven games, compared to Pickford’s 23. Seven.
Similarly with Pope’s problem, Henderson playing so little doesn’t exactly give you confidence of a solid, battle-worn keeper, who won’t panic when Leroy Sane is charging down on you in the quarter finals. It also means I have limited data to play with but we move.
Henderson comes in better than Pope with goals conceded and shots stopped (but the former and latter could be attributed partly to a far better defence in front of him). Across seven games he has conceded four goals against. But the problem, again, is the only seven games.
That’s not to say he isn’t very good. His talent, is undeniable, and best seen in perhaps Sheffield United, from mid-table last season. Without their star keeper, they have struggled. It was a standard scene last season to see Henderson saving Sheffield United’s bacon week-in, week-out. Not only that, but closer to home at the other United in his life, he is being seriously considered as an alternative to David De Gea - who has been Man Utd’s best player in 3 of the last 5 seasons.
He can play with his feet unlike Pope, so can feature as the anchor of the England defence playing out.
So, Henderson’s case is stronger than Pope’s and he looked better in the World Cup Qualifiers a few weeks back. But he’s best summed up in comments from former manager Chris Wilder: “He has the raw qualities. As you have seen here, he makes big saves, but he has to learn from experience and he has to grow,”
“He has proved himself at every level. He has come back from mistakes… First and foremost, he has to cut that out, because as with all the top goalkeepers that play, mistakes are very few and far between.”
Pickford: Probably, yes.
There are two things which set Pickford out from the other two. Pickford’s played every game, and Pickford’s played in an international competition before.
He’s proven, and he’s battle ready in essence.
Like Henderson, he can play out with his feet, and like Pope, he’s a good shot stopper, good at one-on-one’s and generally (like all three) a pretty damn good keeper all round.
His biggest weakness is probably that he’s not the biggest lad on the block, which sometimes shows when someone loops a cross into the box. He’s known to be out-strengthed despite not being massively smaller than either of the other two.
His argument is pretty open and shut because … well he’s done it. He’s been there, got the badge and proven himself and his data backs that up.
Generally quite good. This season, he’s been as prolific a shot stopper as the other two (perhaps sheer game volume?) but excels over both vastly with touches, suggesting he’s really more involved in Everton’s build from the back.
To conclude?
England have some really good young players in this position (you’re going to see this conclusion a lot). Basically, both Henderson or Pickford could do the job, and make a good shout of it. Henderson is probably the better keeper, but Pickford’s proven, Pickford’s got the t-shirt and even won a penalty shootout.
So, I know I’ve sort of slanted towards football recently. Put simply, politics and news were simply making me sad. But, now I’m focusing on them more often, I will dip my toes back into it.
You can’t strong-man you’re way out a pandemic!
The pandemic fundamentally revealed all of the underlying faults in society. The weakest were left more exposed, the vulnerable made more vulnerable, and structural problems threatened to crumble and collapse altogether.
In the UK this was the NHS shaking, the lack of contingency plans, poor use of data which often just wasn’t there and a lot more and a whole lot more like weakened local government, lack of trust in central government blah blah blah.
I list these off for a reason, because there were A LOT of very complicated problems. The type which the best of politicians would struggle with. By and large, we didn’t have the best of politicians, we had popular ones.
It could’ve been worse though, we could’ve had strong men.
Almost universally, you can map countries that fared the worst with Covid-19, to countries who had stereotypically “strong-men” politicians too. Think loud-talking, chest-thumping, usually discriminatory, say what they want, do it my way or the highway male politicians. The likes of Trump, Bolsonaro and Viktor Orban.
These countries fared the worst because a global pandemic is essentially immune to the strengths of these populist politicians. To govern a pandemic, you need expert knowledge from professionals, you need buckets of trust and patience, you need brutal honesty (things are going to be shit, granny might die, things are going to be really shit), you need to understand things won’t go your way, and you’ll have to make a lot of unpopular decisions, and see them out for a while, before you can reap the benefits.
These are basically all things strongmen politicians can’t/won’t do. They defeat most of their problems by talking at it, loudly and aggressively and brashly. They want instant gratification and reward. They need to play people off against one another, you can’t do that against a killer virus!
Everything about them was specifically set up to fail in these instances. Would they hand over vast amounts of public trust (and therefore power) to scientists? Of course not! Would they make people do things they didn’t want, thus making themselves unpopular? You bet not.
There’s a very strong case to be made that Trump lost primarily because of the pandemic, not Joe Biden.
Put simply, the pandemic was not a good time to be a strongman.
Read this fantastic long read on plane stowaways.
A review on a book I’m very excited to read.
And this, by me, on a throw-in coach and the life he lived.