England still needs to find the right tactical solutions

 

After three days of European Championship where many important teams showed some tactical identity, the opening game for England did not provide the same feeling. Southgate's team started the game well and found the net with an header of Jude Bellingham, however after scoring the Three Lions struggled a lot in creating opportunities, especially through positional attacks. In this article I will try to give some quick examples of what went wrong.

LACK OF ORGANIC STRATEGY

The impression about England strategy was to not create an organic setting in order to create danger in attack; the lack of coordination about the right occupation of spaces or about how the players should connect by themselves was evident.

In this example England created the positional structure perfectly covering the five vertical channels in the definition zone, however the Serbian positional defence could not be manipulated due to the fact nobody was attacking the space behind the defensive line. It was very common to see the England team having this shape and behaviour during the match which could not be effective against a 5-3-2 compact positional defence. If just one between Saka and Kane tried to run behind the defence, it would have been more simple for England to have space to exploit between the lines. For example, Germany was able to do this in a very brilliant way against Scotland by going out to in while creating space through the runs of three players behind defensive line.

Against narrow midfield 4, Germany exploit the space between the lines from the outside and the runs of the front three pushed the defenders backwards to extend the space there. Great goal. #euro2024 pic.twitter.com/oJD6dIrTor

— Football Bunseki (@Footballbunseki) June 14, 2024

Here is another example of lack of organic occupation of spaces. And still is the depth to not being covered through a run behind the defensive line. In this case Foden, by dropping deeper attract the right center-back of Serbia, it creates a space behind to be exploited, however Kane does not made the run. England lost in this way an other chance to create danger centrally. In addition it is important to highlight the freedom given to Jude Bellingham. The fact he plays in a team like Real Madrid where attacking players are free to move to find the right positions allows him to help his teammates from the build-up phase. However his movement by dropping deeper was not always followed by counter-movements of other players.

An explanatory picture of the struggles faced by England are related to the penalty area entries, which was equal to 19 (Serbia had 27). Most of the entries was due to the runs of Saka and Walker on the right side. This demonstrates how much poor was the occupation of the centrale spaces. And it also demonstrates that Southgate was relying more on the individual plays of the players rather than enabling them to maximize their strength through some attacking organization. 

ENGLAND RELIES ON INDIVIDUAL PLAY

As said above, England was able to win through some individual initiatives of the most important players. Main situation of danger was created through the individual skills of Bukayo Saka and Jude Bellingham.

Real Madrid player was the goalscorer of the match but also the main actor in all phases of play. As explained before, Southgate left him as much freedom as possible in order to allow him to create the connections with his teammates. This function, however, was not integrated by counter-movements of his teammates. In this example he drops deep to help the build-up phase, this movement would have allowed Alexander-Arnold to move behind Serbian midfield line. By keeping his position, the Liverpool player made the movement of Bellingham redundant, therefore England was not able to progress the ball consistently. It is difficult to say if this situation is due to a lack of understanding by Alexander-Arnold or because Southgate instructed him to keep the position until the ball is moved in the opponent's half.

This is an other reason why the main dangerous situation was coming from individual plays or runs from Bukayo Saka. Arsenal player won 7 of the 8 duels he faced on the opponent midfield. This also explain why more than half ot the attacking play of England was coming from his side. His pace and ability in 1vs1 was exploited much more than expected due to lack of solution centrally (already described) and the absence of solution on the left side where there was no players available to perform overlapping runs from that side. It is not casual the fact that the goal who allowed England to win the match was coming from the right flank.

The build-up of the goal starts again from Bellingham getting deeper to play the ball. Since the ball is played in the opponent half, Alexander-Arnold moves to cover the right half-space which forces Serbia to get narrower. This creates space on the right side where Walker has been able to find a through pass for Saka. His run forces the Serbian defensive line to retreat creating space for the run behind of Jude Bellingham who scored. 

CONCLUSION

Southgate strategy seems to be still not changing. At Euro 2020 his team was devoted in keeping control of the match even when the circumstances allowed to be more aggressive without taking risks. This is the same behaviour noticed against Serbia: some good play until Bellingham breaks the deadlock. From that moment England maintained a very rigid approach trying to control the match. 

In the second half this strategy was also creating issues since Serbia was encouraged to take more risks and being more dangerous. The defensive line height was progressively decreasing throughout the second half and even in the whole match there was a lot of lack of pressure.

The performances of Germany, Italy, Netherlands had in common to trying to be dominant and aggressive by occupying with more players the spaces between midfield and defence. England was very different, the occupation of the central spaces was not effective and, therefore, Southgate needs to improve the coordination between his players if he wants to win the tournament.