PHEW! THAT WAS CLOSE. I deliberately laid-off commenting on the European Championships until it was all over – I had a feeling England, playing all but one game at home, would do well. So I thought, I would wait until all the media hype about football coming home and three lions on the shirt had subsided before posting.
So, what did we learn? In truth, not a lot. We already knew, Scotland was a work in progress, still with a long way to go. We learned that Wales's golden crop of players has probably peaked, that England can always, playing at Wembley, be contenders. But, most-importantly, if you look beyond the final match hype, we learned, British players are not as technically proficient as the best from the continent.
England, after that blitz opening, defended deep against the Italians, who proceeded to pass them off the park. Yes, it took a long time for the dam to burst, but, burst it did. I watch a lot of Rugby Union and the way it is played, the teams who can string together 10, 15 or 20-plus phases of possession always win.
Sunday night's final was like that. Italy repeatedly strung together multi-passing phases of play, where England could not do this. They didn't always get into the England “red zone,” but, all that chasing around as the Italians manipulated the ball back and forth across the field, it finally told on the poor English.
The English media keeps trying to tell us, Harry Kane is a “World-Class” striker. As an old “hot metal” journalist, I wish Editors would tell their sports subs to stop using “world-class” as an adjective. To me, the expression means, if you were picking a team to represent the world in a winner-takes-all inter-galactic football match against, let's say the Klingons, who would your starting XI be?
Well, no way would Kane get into my team ahead of the likes of Mbappe, Grisman, Cristiano Ronaldo, Robert Lewandowski etc. Here was an England captain, in his country's most-important game for 55 years, reduced to near-anonymous fringe status – that's not world-class.
The yardstick against which every England team is measured is the victorious 1966 World Cup team. That team had:
Gordon Banks – the best goalkeeper in the world
Ray Wilson – the best full-back in the world
Bobby Moore – the best central defender in the world
Bobby Charlton – the best goal-scoring midfielder in the world
Jimmy Greaves – the best penalty box scorer in the world (who didn't play in the final)
That's five world-class players, five more than Gareth Southgate currently has at his disposal. They also had, in Alan Ball and Martin Peters, two wide men capable of running all day and stretching any defence – something else Southgate lacked.
The five named above were the best players in their position in the old First Division, where the dominant nationalities in playing terms were Scotsmen and Englishmen. Today's Premier Division, in comparison is a multi-national league, where there isn't one English player who could be said to be the best in his position in the league.
The English-based top clubs, few of which are now English-owned, also insist on a ridiculously long season with the result, come the end of season international tournaments, most of the English players, who have to compensate for their technical failings by the sweat of their brows, are running on fumes.
And, up here in Scotland, the situation is even worse.
No, what I took from Euro2020 is:
Until we have major surgery on British football
Fewer “top” teams playing each other
In smaller ring-fenced league divisions
With a return to a three foreigners rule
And with more technically-proficient home-grown players
Then football is not coming home any time soon.
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