Alas, a state of forever looking ahead has been reached for England.
The beauty of persistently focusing on the future is that you never have to worry about anything really. Short-term goals are abandoned for the greater good – the “bigger picture” – and anything happening here and now doesn’t really matter because it’s about the future.
Of course, the drawback of prioritising the long-term and nothing else is that, in effect, your work will never be allowed to bear fruit because you’ll keep looking ahead.
England fans, since the collapse of Steve McClaren, have been calling for a focus on the future and, in the process, they’ve demanded that the country forget about the like of Michael Carrick when he was in his peak. Bring the kids to the World Cup, then they’ll be ready for eight years time. Eight years later, they want focus on the kids again. They forgot that they developed people like Carrick in the first place so they could enjoy the results when he was older too but, after consistent failure at major tournaments, the idealistic policy was to write off the current crop and focus on a non-contaminated new breed.
That’s hard to do for a manager being judged on the short-term though.
Anyway, Gareth Southgate finds himself in a rare position where the bulk of his best squad options now are younger, less experienced players. Obviously, it’s still not a great squad he has to play with but he has the age profile that will keep fans happy and buy himself another four years.
When England fans used to scoff at and deride their best footballers, when they looked at Rooney and Lampard and Gerrard and thought, ‘they’re finished’ or ‘they don’t have enough energy’, they cried for the injection of youth when no manager in their right mind would’ve looked at United’s Rooney and reasoned he’d rather have Danny Welbeck.
Today, they don’t really have a choice but to go for youth and the stats show that their World Cup squad is not only the youngest but the one with, on average, the fewest caps.
Nick Harris, from sportingintelligence.com, published a graph that reveals the average age and total experience of each squad.
World Cup 2018 squads number-crunched by age and experience pic.twitter.com/bXf74q26od
— Nick Harris (@sportingintel) June 4, 2018
At least when Tunisia are passing England to death, they’ll have a team better capable of chasing them down.
