England must take a more positive approach to next summer’s finals, says Danny Higginbotham

INSIDE FOOTBALL: We need to create excitement and goals

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Even now, a week on, discussing what we have learned about the strengths and weaknesses of Roy Hodgson’s England team feels a little superficial. The events of eight days ago in Paris create some perspective and I think the experience of being in the stadium commentary box when France walked out on Tuesday at Wembley will always live with me.

The anthems are usually a time to clear your mind for commentary and get your thoughts and notes clear. On Tuesday, Mark Saggers, Jim Proudfoot, Ian Danter and I simply had the words for “La Marseillaise” in front of us, not the usual TalkSport match preparation sheets.

If the week revealed one thing about the game we love, it is that players are no different to any others when it comes to the news they digest. I’ll never forget 11 September, 2001, going through the usual routines at Derby, preparing for a League Cup game against Hull City the next day, and then learning about the attacks on America. The atmosphere was eerie when we ran out that following night at Pride Park. Everything felt secondary. That was the game which came back to my mind in the still, quiet calm of Wembley on Tuesday.

We need to create excitement – and goals

It was England’s match in Alicante, against Spain, which had the greater significance of the two internationals. For me, it showed us an approach to international football that England, frankly, must discard before next summer’s European Championship.

What we need to see at that tournament is an England excited by the great attacking players at their disposal: Raheem Sterling, Ross Barkley, hopefully Daniel Sturridge. A team intent on setting them free. What we saw on the Costa Blanca was an England who dropped deep and struggled for self-expression because they were too worried about the opposition. It was the same when we played Italy in the last World Cup. All that anxiety about how to deal with Andrea Pirlo and we lost the game anyway.

Self-expression means going out there intent on scoring the first goal. It’s not something you’ll see me write often in this column but I’ll say it now: tournament football is not about your defence. It’s about scoring goals.

The top four finishing sides in the 2008 and 2012 Euros and 2010 and 2014 World Cups collectively scored in 80 of their 100 games and kept a clean sheet only 44 times. England are too often timorous and afraid to put their own stamp on a match.

Look at their last 11 international tournament games. They’ve only won three but have drawn no fewer than five, with three of those being goalless draws. England have never lost in those tournaments when scoring first: five occasions. They’ve always lost when conceding first: three times. Yet still we are seeing games like Friday’s, when we seem frightened and apprehensive against a side who belly-flopped in the last World Cup. Other countries don’t seem to worry about us half as much as we worry about them.

Dier debut showed fantastic promise

I want to talk about Eric Dier as a very good reason to be cheerful about next summer. Everyone was going on about Deli Alli after the game at Wembley, and of course that was appropriate, but for me Dier played an even bigger part – albeit the kind that, of its nature, always gets overlooked.

The Spurs player’s positioning was fantastic and subtle. Most teams only play one up front now – as did France on Tuesday – which allows one of your own centre-backs to come out with the ball. When John Stones or Gary Cahill did, Dier immediately took up the vacant central defensive position. Dier was once a centre-back himself, so he knew what to do.

What we then saw was a domino effect. As the centre-half comes out, one of the opposition midfield has to go to him, creating extra space for an England midfielder. The security Dier offered also gave licence to the full-backs to go forward and for Ali to advance beyond Harry Kane – Kane likes to drop deep at times so he needs runners.

Sometimes you only know what you’ve got when a player is confronted by the pressure of his debut and you see how he deals with it. With extreme class, in Dier’s case.

You can’t blame Carrick for low-key display

When you see a player not stamping his mark on a game there is frequently a reason which goes beyond that individual’s game – even though there’s no legislating for someone having an off-day of course. Michael Carrick did not find himself showered with garlands after the 2-0 defeat in Spain but I felt England’s negative mindset made it impossible to break the lines with those positive forward passes of his, as he does at his best for Manchester United. By dropping so deep – with almost everyone in England’s third, allowing Spain on to them and Kane on his own up front – England created a situation where their midfielders were totally swamped with red shirts. The minute they got the ball, there was someone on them. It will have been a frustrating night for Carrick but I would argue that there were extenuating circumstances.

How Rooney took the game to France

I was interested to see what Wayne Rooney had to say about the two matches. So often these days there is nuance in the observations he makes as England captain. It’s not soundbites. And his role against France was absorbing to watch, too.

For the first 20 or 30 minutes, he was operating narrow on the left side of midfield, giving the right-back, Bacary Sagna, a decision to make; forcing him to pick Rooney up, which created space for Kieran Gibbs, who at that time was the most active full-back. Then Rooney switched things, operating on the right-hand side in the same way, at which time we saw left-back Lucas Digne find it difficult.

It was another example of England taking the game to the opposition, deciding the way that they wanted to play and looking to find ways to get in around the back of defences – just as we saw Sterling and Ryan Bertrand combining well at brief moments against Spain.

It is not the usual English over-optimism talking when I say that I think the country should be aiming for a semi-final berth next summer. We just need a philosophy, a sense of mission and self-belief.