Andrea Pirlo was underlining why “the Yorkshire Pirlo” wasn’t really the Yorkshire Pirlo. He was complimentary about Kalvin Phillips, and sent the Leeds midfielder a message of good luck, but argued he had no equivalent on these shores.
“In England, there’s never been this kind of player,” he said. “There have been great midfielders over the years with different skills. There’s the boy at Leeds who’s a bit of a regista, but… we’re a bit different. He doesn’t have the same characteristics I had. You’ve always had box-to-box midfielders, like Frank Lampard.”
Pirlo used to specialise in illustrating what England were missing. He was the elegant intellectual who played the game his own way, all technique and no physique as the ball did the running for him. He was a one-man indictment of Roy Hodgson’s England. And years later, when Pirlo had already come and gone as Juventus manager, when England had been transformed into a far more progressive team, his analysis underlined a familiar shortcoming: England’s possession problem.
It was proved by Pirlo’s successors, the twin registas who helped Italy win Euro 2020, in Jorginho and Marco Verratti. Go back to last summer’s final and the Paris Saint-Germain midfielder Verratti completed more passes, some 111, than Phillips, Declan Rice, Jordan Henderson, Mason Mount, Raheem Sterling, Bukayo Saka and Kieran Trippier did between them. And if not all are central midfielders, if most did not play 120 minutes, neither did Verratti, who went off with 25 remaining.
England may be grateful that a rematch with Italy on Saturday is not a reunion with old tormentors. Jorginho and Verratti left the Azzurri squad after the Finalissima. Another chastening night may have been averted; but perhaps only postponed.
Because tournament life for England in the last decade has tended to come with one glaring reminder of the type of player England lack, the sort of cerebral tempo-setter who takes and gives the ball, sometimes seemingly with little purpose, but who wrestles control of the game with their own composure.
It was Pirlo in Euro 2012 in a quarter-final remembered for his Panenka of a penalty. It was a moment in the shootout that pitted the two sides’ most prolific passers against each other: no England player had attempted more that day than Joe Hart. Pirlo completed more than the four midfielders Hodgson started and the two he brought on did between them. That Hodgson used 4-4-2 against Italy’s diamond produced another familiar English failing: a capacity to be outnumbered in the middle.
Fast forward to Brazil in 2014 and Pirlo completed another century of passes, even if his most significant contribution did not entail touching the ball, with a dummy. Daniele de Rossi was cruelly stuck on 99 when the final whistle went. Mario Balotelli was the matchwinner but Pirlo the defining figure.
England contrived to implode in Euro 2016 without needing to be exposed by a professional passer. Come the 2018 World Cup and Gareth Southgate had a different team and a different ethos. He had a split midfield, with Jordan Henderson at the base and two runners, in Dele Alli and Jesse Lingard, trying to get ahead of the ball. It worked well until England encountered a duo who made the most of the space in between, in Luka Modric and Ivan Rakitic. Each of Croatia’s three central midfielders, including Marcelo Brozovic, made more passes than any Englishman.
As in the Euro 2020 final, England lost the initiative before they lost their lead. They felt worn down by the weight of passes.
It was another triumph for the double metronome, for the policy of passing. It is not something England can really implement. They had 35 per cent of the ball against Italy last year, 44 versus Croatia in 2018.
They have produced some different types of players in recent years – more attacking full-backs, adaptable inside forwards, inverted wingers – but the most alien of breeds remains a Modric, a Pirlo or a Spanish-style passer.
Phillips is a fine diagonal passer, Henderson an underrated infield crosser, Rice ever better at driving runs. Each nevertheless has more in common with the box-to-box prototype Pirlo cited, albeit lacking Lampard’s extraordinary goalscoring record, than Pirlo himself.
James Ward-Prowse and Conor Gallagher can feel still more English. Perhaps Jude Bellingham has the potential to offer a broader skillset than each but it does not render him Modric Mk II.
If it is partly a question of tactics, and the question of how Southgate counters a team built around professional passers, England feel unable to answer in kind. It seemed the moral of their first hour in Munich on Tuesday, failing trial by Joshua Kimmich and Ilkay Gundogan. It leaves them forever trying to camouflage one of their own shortcomings while also nullifying their opponents’ strengths in such matches. Because for England there are times when possession is nine-tenths of their flaw.
