Gareth Southgate is not about to abandon his back-three against Germany tonight, nor at this winter’s World Cup, after the England manager spent the weekend considering how his side can be more of a threat going forward.
Unless England score in the first six minutes at Wembley this evening, they will surpass 500 minutes without a goal from open play and there is no more pressing issue for Southgate than addressing their chronic lack of creativity before Qatar.
Southgate has insisted England are simply struggling to finish their chances but against Italy on Friday they had precious few sights of goal until the hosts were already 1-0 up, and Harry Kane forced a double save from Gianluigi Donnarumma.
Southgate’s back-three inherently limits the number of attackers in the side, and Raheem Sterling has revealed the manager has been working out “where we can find that extra man with this five at the back”.
One consideration is pushing one of his holding midfield players — likely to be Jordan Henderson and Jude Bellingham tonight — higher but Southgate has ruled out moving the likes of Phil Foden or Jack Grealish into a deeper role.
Another potential solution to England’s creativity problem is to harness Kane’s qualities as a playmaker, by allowing the captain to operate deeper and partnering him with two direct forwards.
There has been much tedious debate about whether Kane drops too deep for England, but at club level he has proven that being creator and goalscorer are not mutually exclusive roles.
For England, however, Kane is increasingly more of an out-and-out finisher and he rarely runs a game. For Spurs, Kane averages an assist roughly every three league games but he has set up just three goals in his last 29 appearances for England.
Like Southgate, Antonio Conte, the Spurs head coach, uses a back-three, while the Italian’s predecessor, Jose Mourinho, shared the England manager’s tendency to prioritise his team’s stability over attacking flair, often at the expense of his best players.
Neither Conte nor Mourinho, however, had problems in unleashing Kane as a scorer and creator, suggesting Southgate is not getting the best from his captain.
“He has always been a tremendous creator for us,” Southgate said on Sunday. “Maybe the chances haven’t been finished that he’s created.
“He’s a fantastic player at dropping lower and linking the game, he has always done that. For a large part of the time I have been working with him I remember the criticism being he is too far from the goal and linking too much.”
International football is different to the club game, with defences generally deeper, leaving less space behind for runners to feed off Kane’s passes. But there is also the question of the players around him.
At Spurs, Kane has Heung-min Son but England are missing a forward who excels at getting in behind since Marcus Rashford lost his place in the squad.
Sterling and Foden, who are expected to flank the captain tonight, prefer to operate in front of defences, and Kane’s partnership with the former, which has been so key to Southgate’s success, has dried up in the past year.
No player in the 21st Century has provided more England assists than Sterling’s six for Kane, but his last was in the 5-0 win over Albania in November 2021.
Unless they combine tonight, it will be a year since their last exchange by the time England kick-off their World Cup against Iran, while November 2021 also marked Kane’s last goal from open play.
“Me and him have already got a good relationship on the field, assisting each other and vice-versa,” said Sterling. “I’ve had moments when I haven’t scored for a while and you just need a good performance from the team and that can change.”
