Gareth Southgate says England are “definitely making progress” in terms of fitness, as he said the build-up to the final Euro 2024 group match against Slovenia required “a reset button” and “open and honest conversations”.
The manager clearly hopes this game will be a watershed in the team’s tournament, after two poor opening performances that brought four points but also a lot of criticism. Southgate himself made a point of stating how a lot of that was down to the physical condition of the players, who he found couldn’t press in the way the team wanted. He stressed this is something that has improved over the last week. Southgate specifically pointed to the varying situations of Marc Guehi, Kieran Trippier and Harry Kane.
“We're definitely making progress. If you think that when we got Marc Geuhi through the door, he'd had 70 minutes, that was the most he'd played for Crystal Palace in the last three months. Trips [Trippier] hadn't had a 90 minutes for three months. Then we had Harry and others coming back from injuries as well, so two games in, with a bit of recovery time, all of those will be in a better place. That's definitely going to help us as we progress through the tournament,” he said.
While Declan Rice had promised England would be on the “front foot” for the Slovenia match, Southgate qualified that. The England manager even appeared to contradict his midfielder’s points that physical condition is not an issue, as he spoke of what they saw in the 1-0 warm-up defeat to Iceland.
“Well it’s been our course for years so there were clear reasons for needing to adapt that a little bit at the beginning of the tournament, following on from the game against Iceland and the physical condition of some of the players.
“So our identity for a while has been pretty clear. We haven’t quite seen that in the first couple of games and there was a need to have a reset button and have open and honest conversations but that is a reflection.
“We reflect as a coaching team. The players are reflective. So nobody has been ducking anything this week, nobody has been alone in their thoughts. It’s a real collective because we’re all on the same page. That allows us to assess where we were and how we need to progress in the same direction.”
Southgate has been preparing to bring in Conor Gallagher for Trent Alexander-Arnold in midfield, but played down the idea of making huge changes.
“Well, the big risk is you have a knee-jerk reaction and you move away from things that are going well. You can rip everything up and go in a completely different direction but what’s actually going well? We don’t want to lose what’s going well.
“Then it’s okay, how can we add to what we’re doing? Your best players are still your best players. We might not have functioned as a team as we would have liked for a large part of the second game and a half of the first game but that doesn’t mean what we’ve been doing for the last two years in particular and the period before that, we shouldn’t be throwing everything out of the window.
“That’s where we have to stay calm and make sensible decisions and make the right calls, keep everybody on track. We were pretty certain four points would qualify us and then it’s about winning the group. We’ve trodden this path before, we’re exactly where we were points wise in the last Euros, scored a goal more and conceded a goal more. On the path to the next round and now we want to control our destiny by winning the group.”
Southgate was asked when Adam Wharton might be involved given how he seems to possess the midfield attributes England have lacked, but merely said he’d be “ready” when called on.
"He's training very well. He's really enjoying life in a senior cap. He was in a 19s camp, his last one, so he's making tremendous progress and doesn't look out of place at all within the group. He plays passes that really release the team quickly, so we're very happy with Adam and he'll be ready if he's called upon.”
This isn’t a dead rubber for England, given a draw or defeat to Slovenia could see English finish second or third in the group. Second would bring a last-16 meeting with Germany in Dortmund on Saturday.
"However we play in the next round, if we win the group and play a third-placed team, that could be Holland, Austria,” Southgate said. “They're top sides. It would be a myth to think we're going to have an easier route by avoiding certain teams or playing others, I think.”
