Lucky general Southgate and England dancing out of the dark — somehow

Onwards they go, to Dusseldorf next and wherever else the soft side of the draw can take them. Never mind that for 94-plus minutes here they had all of the firmness of a wet sock themselves. The soft side is their side and, with Bellingham having hauled them out of the darkness, they’re ready to dance again…apparently.

After he’d contorted his body in the air to avoid another truly epic English crash landing Bellingham had bellowed “Who else?” To be fair this was a day of many questions without answers, the most confounding being ‘how, in the name of jaysus, did they survive this?’ What a world.

As their fans made the slow, churning way up to Gelsenkirchen’s leafy, post-industrial wastelands Sunday lunchtime the soundtrack was only positive. Given how they’d got here — by stinking up the handiest group — their outlook was admirable. A new favourite was dominating the airwaves.

To the air of Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 banger, they sang about not starting a fire without a spark, the next line “Phil Foden’s on fire. He’ll be playing the Germans off the park.” That Foden, like all of Southgate’s leading lights, had mostly been playing himself off the park for the first two weeks didn’t matter. It was the opening weekend of Euro 2024’s knockout stages and England had only Slovakia to beat to finally get going.

Sixty seconds away from going home and with this place mostly silent, Bellingham produced the spark, a spectacular one so out of keeping with all that had preceded it your brain took a while to link with the eyes. Bewitching beauty where only hapless blundering had been. Can it be the ignition which actually turns all of this around? It was, coupled with Ivan Toney’s huge influence off the bench, enough here.

Perhaps Gareth Southgate, whatever else about him now unquestionably a lucky general, stumbles away from the darkness of Gelsenkirchen into some sort of clarity. He has six days to get Luke Shaw fit. Harry Kane is scoring big goals again and Kobbie Mainoo offered 84 minutes of evidence that he can help the mess in midfield. Offsetting that is the utter dirge which preceded the turnaround. Changes are essential.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Southgate insisted. “Everyone will still be questioning our performances but we’ve got some qualities that have kept us in this. That’s not to be underestimated.” 

Correct. This is not a Euros blessed with complete packages. Slovakia’s shortcomings were all too clear once legs tired. Switzerland are next and have issues of their own. Tournaments are peculiar things and this peculiar evening, always compelling even with England so constipated, could be the start of something new.

Mainoo wasn’t born when so many of the failures of old happened. Maybe that’s why Southgate thrust him in. Unaware is unscarred. How close he came to being part of a new wounded generation.

If having Jordan Pickford scream at you is a rite of passage of these English occasions, Mainoo got it out of the way nice and early, two minutes to be exact. Five minutes later he was in the book. This didn’t seem like a good start yet Mainoo was making a difference, just not the difference.

He was doing the small, linky stuff well, better than his two predecessors, Conor Gallagher and Trent-Alexander Arnold who’d both partnered Declan Rice. But the whole remained unlinked, particularly the defence behind him. A Lego set taken out of the box but just left there.

When Mainoo met a clearance and flashed a 24th-minute volley past the woodwork it was as close as England got to a first-half opener. Within 20 seconds they’d be carved open at the other end and Slovakia had a deserved lead, half of Southgate’s team all somehow at fault. The toil deepened and Pickford screamed some more.

In the England technical area, Southgate was approached numerous times by assistant Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, lots of vigorous pointing. The last entry on the Coaching Career section of Hasselbaink’s Wikipedia page helpfully informs: “He resigned as Burton Albion manager in…2022 with his team sitting bottom of the table…claiming that he had ‘taken the club as far as I can’.” Super. Jimmy surely had the answers then.

Nope. The questions instead piled and piled, including how did Foden botch a disallowed leveller? They changed damn all until Bellingham changed it entirely. Then Kane added the inevitable and here they were again, Southgate in the post-match press conference relating Toney to Geoff Hurst and discussing 1966 presentations to the team.

“In terms of ’66 we just wanted to highlight that tournaments take you in strange places and difficult routes,” he said. “The team wasn’t always flying.” Strange places indeed.