The England midfield in the 2018 Nations League win against Croatia has melted our brain
Who remembers 2018? Yeah, you remember 2018.
It was the ‘before’ times, wasn’t it? Simpler times. A time when England started to believe in its football team again almost entirely due to the sheer magnetic power of waistcoats.
It was a year best remembered for the run to the World Cup semi-final that summer, but it was one that also featured England’s march to the final stages of the inaugural UEFA Nations League.
It was almost exactly five years ago now that England exacted a measure of revenge for the World Cup by coming from behind to beat semi-final conquerors Croatia 2-1 at an absolutely bouncing Wembley. At 1-0 down with time running out, England faced relegation. When Harry Kane prodded home an 85th-minute winner they were through to the semi-finals.
People get sniffy about the Nations League but we rather like it. It’s better than friendlies and more competitive than qualifiers. It gives teams more halfway meaningful games against teams approximately at their level. And as that dizzying day in November 2018 – and England’s current B League status – highlighted, a genuine sense of peril for everyone. Finish fourth in a group with three other good teams and down you go. Can and will happen to anyone.
What’s striking now about that particular game against Croatia, though, is just how giddy people were about how good England could be. At either end of the pitch, very little has really changed. Jordan Pickford was in goal, with Kyle Walker, John Stones and Ben Chilwell among the back four. The front three was Harry Kane flanked by Raheem Sterling and Marcus Rashford. It’s been slow and frankly almost non-existent evolution rather than revolution at the front and the back. But the midfield. My word, the midfield.
A shiny and fictitious pound for anyone who can name England’s three-man midfield that afternoon without Googling. We’re very confident our theoretical pound is safe.
Remember, this was a game England won on a wave of positive vibes and good feels.
Remember also that this midfield was up against the greatest central midfielder of his generation in Luka Modric, with the enormously handy Marcelo Brozovic alongside him.
And England’s midfield that day was, wait for this…Eric Dier, Ross Barkley and Fabian Delph.
Drink it in, because that is magnificent. And worth remembering when the media try to drum up some panic about England having to play a couple of qualifying games without Jude Bellingham for a tournament they have already qualified for.
To be fair, by the time England turned the game around in the last 15 minutes, two of that midfield three had been replaced. Only Dier – who has barely played midfield at club level since that day, never mind international – lasted the full 90 minutes. In place of Barkley and Delph came a pair of proper elite international midfielders in, er, Jesse Lingard and Dele. Neither of whom are really midfielders at all, are they?
Lingard scored the equaliser in what by Southgate terms can be seen very much as a death-or-glory kind of change. The only actual midfielder England had on the pitch when turning round a 1-0 deficit AGAINST LUKA MODRIC is one who is now an out-of-favour centre-back trying gamely to learn how to play a sarcastically high-line in depleted Angeball.
And we were all giddy about that team! We all thought that team could be world beaters. There were absences, in fairness. A pre-disgrace Jordan Henderson probably just sneaks into that midfield had he been available. But still.
We’ve always thought of Southgate’s time as England boss of being one of very quiet and gradual and careful evolution and that’s because really it has been for the most part. But that midfield sat between such a familiar-looking defence and an attack that could, if Southgate hadn’t entirely forgotten Sterling existed for some reason, very competently do the job now.
In between, a centre-back, a retired central-midfielder-cum left-back and a Luton squad player. It’s useful to look back on these things, not least because it perhaps explains in some large part why Southgate never seems too worried about having to deploy a rusty Kalvin Phillips. He’s already seen things you wouldn’t believe.
