England are still at Euro 2024

 England are still at Euro 2024

You may have noticed that the England football team are still in Euro 2024. The Union Jacks and St George flags are still festooning every pub, supermarket and office across this green and pleasant land called England, the country that will next week be heading towards their voting booths and electing a new Prime Minister. Now generally speaking, this should be cause for effusive joy and elation and possibly a good enough reason for a street party or cracking open several bottles of vintage champagne. But the spectre of politics hangs over the United Kingdom rather like the smoke of an industrial chimney.

England's dire goal-less draw with Slovenia the other night was so dull and anodyne that you'd have been forgiven for thinking that nothing of any significance had taken place. For much of the match it was as if somebody had deliberately turned off the lights and forgotten where the switch was. It was rather like one of those military operations where everything had been very structured and regimented and nobody was allowed to smile. England plodded, walked, stopped, briefly started, stuttered and then just gave it all up as a bad job.

But then this was England's last match in the group stage so you had to make some concessions.We were through to the next round and, on Sunday, Gareth Southgate's men will have to undergo the severest of scrutinies. The microscope may find it hard to see where any of the problems may lie since we have been here a hundred times with England. They squeeze their way painfully out of the group stage of any of these blue riband international tournaments and the channels of communication are lost in the translation.

The trouble is, of course, that we know where England may be going wrong but were too frightened to ask. The explanations and solutions may be staring us fully in the face. The connections may be working to some extent but then, suddenly, there's nowhere to go. For 90 minutes, England kept getting tangled against the barbed wire of Slovenia's water tight defence and although it looked logical and perfectly understandable at times, every time England constructed what they thought passed for a genuinely threatening attack, thick Slovenian blankets simply stifled Gareth Southgate's men and steel shutters made England's task that much harder. 

Wherever the white shirts of England went, Serbia just blocked, smothered, closed down or simply followed England wherever they went. It must have been deeply frustrating to see all of those careful deliberations just blown out of the water for those who have followed the national team so faithfully over the years. Admittedly, the low defensive block- whatever that meant- deployed by Slovenia just turned the game into a weird, surreal spectacle where England just seemed to lose their map. If this had been an orienteering expedition then they may well have given up and just called it a day. 

Over the years and decades England always do this to us. They have that innate capacity to be entertaining and well intentioned but for some reason it just doesn't seem to happen for them when they need it most. Once again England started drawing crop circles across the pitch, increasing the tempo for a while and then slackening off completely when one avenue had been blocked so irritatingly. There was a point when it felt as if the game was about to be postponed because from where you were sitting there was an embargo on the game or there was a malicious rumour that a game of football had actually broken out.

This was not the way the Beautiful Game was supposed to be played. We kept waiting and waiting and sometimes imagining that maybe we'd missed something. England, as was the case against Denmark, fell into the same traps as they had for long periods during that game. There was a sense here England had moved no further forward than they thought had been the case. If anything, this was a serious decline into some emotionless, repressed England, an England attempting to do the simple things valiantly but never really achieving anything of any substance.

When either Kieran Trippier, John Stones, Kyle Walker and Declan Rice combined to some effect at times, it looked very appealing and quite fetching on the eye. But, in one stark moment that will live on in the mind, Rice just ground to a standstill, stepping thoughtfully on the ball, gazing around the pitch and almost completing a thorough inspection of the penalty area. The trouble was that the Arsenal defender just seemed to be walking around in a bewildered trance and genuinely at a complete loss.

So we looked to Phil Foden, Jude Bellingham, Harry Kane and Conor Gallagher, reinstated into the team by Gareth Southgate in the ultimate show of loyalty to players on the fringe of the squad. Then Bukayo Saka, the tricky Arsenal winger, turned inside his defenders with  subtle changes of pace, before accelerating towards the line and then, regrettably, losing the ball. So far, all of Southgate's carefully laid out plans were just missing both their point and purpose. And this is not the way we thought it would be.

Admittedly, the likes of Serbia, Denmark and Slovenia were never likely to be spectacular showstoppers or world beaters and we knew this would be one of the lowest scoring groups in Euro 2024. But these should have been the kind of opposition that, in theory, shouldn't have given England sleepless nights. But then England woke up in a hot sweat and were lulled into a false sense of security. But hey, come on these are early days for Gareth Southgate's England and, besides, 58 years ago Sir Alf Ramsey looked totally bemused by a Uruguay side who were quite clearly content to park several coaches in front of their defence as England's 1966 World Cup winners could only mange a goal-less draw in their opening group match. Be patient everybody. Things can only get better and they will.