Liverpool’s press has been weakened this season, exposing their right-back – and Southgate knows it could happen with England
Nonessential shops are reopening, fans are returning to stadiums, and English football has developed an unhelpful monomania in the run-up to a major tournament, demanding long-considered plans be ripped up to satisfy some ill-considered primal urge to be excited. Everything, slowly, is returning to normal.
General grumbling that Gareth Southgate is not a gung-ho maverick willing to shoehorn every eligible attacking player into one pulsating team of impossible genius has found a specific focus and, moreover, one who is young enough that this could run and run, far beyond this summer’s Euros.
