On… Euro 2024 #4: Into The Mixer
There is a story about the first time Leo Messi played football, no doubt apocryphal, in which, despite having joined his father’s local youth team at age four, he was considered too small to play. His grandmother cajoled his Dad to put Little Leo on, and relenting, he threw his son into the fire. The tale goes that Messi, barely bigger than the ball, took it on his left foot, dribbled past all of the opposition players, and slotted it home.
Now, my childhood stories of football cannot quite be framed in such soft-focus hues. I was a half-decent player as a kid and had four trials for Leicester City. Unfortunately, I peaked at around the age of nine, a kind of inverse Jamie Vardy.
I played as a goalkeeper, and as were the rules and culture of English children’s football in the early 2000s, at the age of 10, we moved from 7-a-side pitches to full size. I am a small man; I think I’m 5”7, so imagine how short I was then. In that adult goal, as that tiny, nervous, increasingly overweight kid, I must have resembled a chicken tasked with guarding the gates of Rome.
The utter insanity of forcing 10-year-olds to play football on adult-sized pitches only changed in the 2014–15 season. Following a vote of all the FA counties, in which 99 dipshits still voted to keep the same rules, it was decided that from ages 6–8, kids will play 5-a-side, 8–10 7-a-side, and 10–12 9-a-side before moving up to full size from 12 onwards. This was all part of the process of fostering the fabled “English DNA," in which long balls into the mixer for the big man were out and technical skills, control, and passing were in.
What is striking about these changes was the reluctance of the FA and the local counties to back them. The FA of that era was still, in some ways, trapped in the cartoonish mire of isolationism. This ridiculous idea that English ways were the best; we invented the game, blood and guts, concrete and piss, two world wars, etc.
When Dan Ashworth, then FA Technical Director, presented the initial plan to model England’s development plan on the German blueprint that eventually led to victory in the 2014 World Cup, he was told by a board member that we shouldn’t be imitating our greatest enemy.
It was actually Gareth Southgate who travelled the country, meeting with the heads of the local FA’s, to persuade these cigar and tweed-infused men that changing pitch sizes was imperative to making England successful. These ludicrous rules were damaging to the English game, creating the problems the national side has been dealing with for decades. He managed to convince 87% of them and was an integral element in forging the DNA that has led England to two successive Euro finals.
So it is a remarkable twist of irony that Southgate stands on the brink of immortality by playing the most English football possible. While England have certainly improved(ish) during the tournament, his side have still played mostly turgid, often unwatchable classic English suffer-ball.
England have an unbalanced midfield, unable to keep control of the ball, collapsing into a no-press low block as the pressure increases, with static movement and a dysfunctional left side. Twas ever thus, as the old saying goes.
The team were saved in the Round of 16 against Slovakia in the most English way imaginable: going 4-4-2, throwing the big man Toney up front, a long throw into the box, and a rare moment of genius from Bellingham. It was followed by a punting corner and two headers from the two strikers and into the net.
It was lucky, ludicrous, ancient, and pretty glorious.
We now play Spain in the final, who have been without question the best team of the tournament. They play attractive, clinical, possession football and could become the first team to win all seven matches at Euros. They seemed to have finally shrugged off the trauma of the 2014 World Cup collapse and created a new generation of players capable of succeeding the Xavi-Iniesta era.
English football has, over the last 15 years, been aiming to emulate that Spanish team. So much has been said about England needing to develop a modern style, of which that era of Spanish football represents. And they go into a major final up against the latest proponents of that ideology. Yet, after all these years of progress, of fighting against the tired century-old anachronism of English footballing culture, we may well end the [insert years] of hurt with a long ball and a bullet off a bonce.