Collymore: Don’t blame Gareth Southgate for England’s woes
It’s not been the best of tournaments for Gareth Southgate and his England team.
The Three Lions came into Euro 2024 as favourites, but they’ve looked incredibly poor in all of their games so far.
Much of the blame for that has fallen at Southgate’s door, with a system picked that just hasn’t appeared to have worked.
Trying to fit all of Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden and Bukayo Saka in behind Harry Kane is an experiment that has needed to be changed, and yet the England coach has steadfastly refused to do so.
Tiredness to blame for poor England performances
As we get to the business end of the tournament now, with just three wins needed for glory and the first major silverware since 1966, Southgate has got to get things right.
However, as former professional and CaughtOffside columnist, Stan Collymore notes, it’s not the coach that’s the problem.
“If you look at the teams that are starting to get to the pointy end of the Euros, tiredness has become a major factor. I saw France and Holland coming out at half-time of their games recently and they looked wasted. Everyone was like ‘here we go again,’” he said for his exclusive column.
“This is going to be a major problem and will be at the World Cup in only two years time.
“When is the madness going to end, whereby we celebrate nations like Georgia and Turkey rightly for the freshness in their performances, but we castigate players like Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham, or maybe some of the Dutch guys for their performances.
“The answer is the same and is very simple.
“Some of the guys that have looked incredibly fresh, lively and on their toes whilst playing a super brand of football have been precisely that because the intensity, on and off the pitch, isn’t there for a lot of Georgian, Turkish and Austrian players.
“For England players, French players, for some of the Germans and some of the Dutch etc. it is, so we’ve got to address it.
“Whether it be Harry Kane, Kylian Mbappe or other high profile stars, we want to be seeing our very, very best players playing their very, very best football at the end of a tournament, not in September, October for their clubs.
“We’ve got to stop flogging dead horses.
“If you play in the Premier League and La Liga, and to a lesser degree, the Bundesliga, Ligue Un and Serie A, the intensity of the media interest as well as the intensity of the games means that you are just spent.
“I’m a massive fan of players only playing 50 professional games a season. That’s it, across all tournaments. That would focus minds, but I think that in the short term, a player that gets knocked out at the Euros this coming weekend does not go back to their club team for six full weeks.”
It should be remembered that there will be changes to the Club World Cup and Champions League next season, and at the end of the campaign there is the Nations League tournament. Not to mention the World Cup at the end of the 2025/26 season.
The football authorities really do need to take a long, hard look at themselves if they want their major stars to continue to give the paying public value for money.
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