TheMoreYouKnow
Registered User
There's another problem there though. You got guys coached by Pep and Klopp to do one thing, and those are pretty intense systems, and then you got a national team which could play like Pep or like Klopp or completely differently and you have a few practice sessions every few months to drill it. It's never gonna be like a club team and any complex modern system is challenging in that environment.Biggest problem is you take young players coached by the likes of Pep, Arteta, Klopp or Ancelotti and you expect them to win with a coach like Southgate. It's like expecting a bus driver to win a F1 race albeit in the best car.
If there's one accusation that can rightfully be aimed at Southgate is that he never found his best lineup. And that's the same criticism I had of Jogi Löw in the last 5-6 years of his tenure. I don't think you can win an international tournament, if you don't have a lineup where you have a settled core. You can make a switch here or there based on form and injury, but you gotta have an idea of 7-8 core guys and how they should play together.
Spain played the exact lineup from the Euro Final in the friendly vs Brazil in March and they had several more matches last season where you had all the significant Euro contributors playing together (except for Yamal obviously). Southgate meanwhile has been meddling with his lineups and structure throughout.
However, I think with England that's always going to be a problem because the media will push for in-form players and a manager who sticks with established players will get ripped for it, see how his selection of Kane is treated now. The problem is that if you want, you can attack a manager from all sorts of different angles and if the team isn't hoisting trophies there's no shortage of people in England who want to attack the national team manager.