Poor Gareth Southgate. Having three outstanding finishers is giving him a thumping headache ahead of the European Championship. Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham and Phil Foden are thrilling football crowds with their goal-scoring talents in three of the best domestic leagues in the world. Most national team managers would welcome such a golden trio: but for Southgate it is a case of pass the paracetamol. He must wish the quality in his squad was more evenly spread so he didn’t have to keep picking Harry Maguire as the central defender when he has the turning circle of a small ocean-going liner.
Kane is the only one of the trio who’s an out-and-out striker; and of the three, City’s Foden is clearly the problem for Southgate. Were he eligible to play for any other home nation, he would be the first player on the team sheet for the next ten years – but he seems more of a pain in the manager’s side than a gem to be permanently embedded in the England team.
Were Foden eligible to play for any other home nation, he would be the first player on the team sheet for the next ten years
The issue is where to play him. Pep Guardiola seems happy to use him centrally now, though he can send him out wide too. Southgate almost always uses him wide. The romantics among us would like a midfield three of Declan Rice as a holding midfielder, Foden as the traditional No. 8, going from box to box, and Bellingham as a No. 10 behind Harry Kane. But Southgate is always cautious and wants to make sure he has defensive solidity in midfield, so he will probably go for Manchester United’s Kobbie Mainoowith Rice and Bellingham. This would push Foden – who will almost certainly win the Player of the Season award – out to the left of a front three with Kane and Bukayo Saka of Arsenal. Fine, but is it a waste of Foden’s immense talents? Discuss.
Meanwhile are tabloid newspaper proprietors exercising undue backroom influence on the appointment of Liverpool managers? First we had Klopp, now it’s going to be Slot, and both appointments have clearly been made in the interests of editors having to write massive punning headlines with just a few characters.
Jurgen Klopp’s retirement from Anfield has been an object lesson in how not to do it. Would Mo Salah, all£400,000 a week of him, have had that nasty bust-up with Klopp at West Ham if the manager had been staying? My feeling is Klopp has punctured the necessary intensity of the relationship between manager and players, all of them multi-multi-millionaires, by announcing so far in advance that he was off. He is clearly a good man and a great leader and felt he was doing the right thing. But it’s not so obvious now that he was.
Reassuringly in the anniversary year of ‘Waterloo’ (that’s Abba’s Eurovision hit, not the battle) the eminently sensible nation of Sweden has decided not to introduce VAR any time soon. Something to think about over here, no? The offside law was invented to prevent goal-hanging, not to make tiny calculations based on a player’s toenail sticking out, which bear no relation to the rest of the game. Now VAR spoils every goal because fans can’t trust that it’s not going to get wiped out because of a misplaced elbow. So come on Premier League, be more Swedish. Be more Abba.
Sadly no television match official was available for the incident at 4 a.m. in a Majorca nightclub in which England rugby giant Billy Vunipola was tasered by police. Vunipola said it was ‘an unfortunate misunderstanding’. Of course it was. Sometimes these players do get away with it. Imagine if Jack Grealish had been involved in a mid-season bar fracas involving a double tasering: headlines for months. Big Billy gets fined a couple of hundred euros and it’s over before his flight has touched down at Luton.
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