Gareth Southgate admits Phil Foden and Mason Greenwood controversy influenced cautious England selection

The Three Lions struggled to create chances against Denmark on Tuesday evening

Gareth Southgate had admitted that the week’s controversy influenced him to play a more cautious approach in the 0-0 draw with Denmark, as he was conscious of the criticism had they been too open.

The England manager admitted that this camp was “incredible” and involved “the whole book” in terms of complications, as Phil Foden and Mason Greenwood followed Harry Maguire in being banished from the squad, after the duo breached Covid protocols in Iceland. 

Southgate thereby felt it was necessary to avoid “looking a mess” in the match against Denmark. England put out two holding midfielders in Kalvin Phillips and Declan Rice, meaning they started with five defensive players on the pitch in a 3-5-2.

“The system was something I wanted to try, we had two days working at it,” Southgate said. “There are nuances in it where we can be more productive and adventurous with it, but tonight when we were putting new players in, and on the back of everything on the last couple of days, we needed to be secure and solid. 

"If we’d been lightweight and wide open and looked a mess, we could have left here with a completely different sort of outcome, and everybody pointing at yesterday as the cause of it, and we just needed a solid base to work from tonight. We tried to then accelerate the game, but weren’t quite able to convert that into the win at the end.”

Southgate admitted this was one of the most trying camps he’d had as manager of England, but said the timing didn’t help, given it comes in the middle of pre-season.

“I think every camp with England has complications. As a group of staff we talk about that we hope the next one will be normal and we kind of say what would normal look like? So, the reality is that you always have these obstacles, you always have these incidents of some sort or another and it is just which ones are they going to be. This time we seem to have gone through the whole book but it is an incredible environment. It was when I was playing and it feels even more complex in the modern world.”

Southgate said “playing in the pre-season period” raised particular complications.

“ We were obviously without eight players when we started but also six came back from holiday and had not trained for two weeks and we had another four who had not played a minute of pre-season due to quarantine and other issues so you are selecting a team tonight based around who you think can finish the game and then you are making substitutes based on those sort of match minutes so at elite level, this is a bizarre situation to be in.”

Southgate did feel there were some positives.

“I think these are real pluses from individual performances, I’m thinking of Eric Dier and Conor Coady in particular, so you know two games from Eric in a new position in terms of his international career, and showed really strongly, so I think all the debutants were pluses.”

The England manager meanwhile said he has to talk with Foden and Greenwood much more before deciding on their short-term futures with England, and whether they will face further sanction.

“Yeah I need to spend time… because I don’t know the two boys well. I need to spend time to understand all of that situation far better than I had time to speak yesterday. I literally had 10 minutes before training, and five minutes before we left, for something as significant as we’ve been through. That isn’t an adequate opportunity to really sit and talk things through.”