It felt before this game that the one thing Lee Carsley had to do was to keep the ship afloat. Just guide HMS Carsball through the relatively benign waters of Nations League Group B2 and surely the permanent England manager’s job would be his.
But over the course of Thursday evening at Wembley the ship ran aground, not once but twice. Suddenly, what felt like a secure future for the England team, a clear course from here to the U.S. in 2026, does not look quite as certain any more.
Firstly when England put in a disastrously bad performance, thoroughly outplayed by Greece, flattered by a 2-1 scoreline which should have been far worse. Carsley fielded an experimental system: no recognised striker, too much creative talent. England looked unbalanced, confused and painfully vulnerable whenever they lost the ball.
The second time was after the game, when Carsley gave his press conference. Asked whether England’s defeat might damage his chances of getting the job permanently, Carsley gave an answer which surprised the room: “I was quite surprised after the last camp in terms of ‘the job’s mine’ and ‘it’s mine to lose’ and all the rest of it,” Carsley said. “My remit has been clear. I’m doing three camps, there’s three games left and then hopefully I’ll be going back to the under-21s.”
Carsley was asked to clarify his comments more than once and he took half a step back, reiterating that he “would not rule myself in or out” of the process, and insisting that being the England manager was “one of the best jobs in the world”. But it was neither a firm statement that he wanted the job, nor that he wanted to fully wash his hands of it.
Carsley watches on as England lose to Greece (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
Maybe Carsley was trying to push back against the assumption that the job was automatically his. Maybe he was trying to say that he was relaxed about the outcome, whether he gets the top job or goes back to the under-21s instead. Maybe he was trying to take the pressure off the FA. But the net result was to leave people with more questions than answers — much like the game we had all just watched.
Coming into this game the big question was how Carsley would integrate Phil Foden, Jude Bellingham and Cole Palmer into the team that won both of their games last month. This was the conundrum that Gareth Southgate could never solve, as England failed to get anywhere near the best out of those three at the Euros this summer. The hope was that Carsley, with his extra level of tactical nous, would be able to fit the pieces together.
The solution, with Harry Kane out injured, was for Bellingham to start up front, with Foden and Palmer in the midfield. Anthony Gordon and Bukayo Saka were on the wings, leaving Declan Rice to do all the legwork in midfield. Here, finally, was an unshackled, unleashed England team. Southgate’s handbrake had been ripped from the car and tossed out of the window.
And it was a mess. England created only one real chance before Bellingham’s late equaliser, Palmer skying a shot from a Bellingham pull-back. Beyond that, it was plenty of possession that went nowhere on the edge of Greece’s penalty area. Quite a few crosses to no one in particular. And a strong sense that this was no solution at all to England’s problems. The more creativity they had on the pitch, they less they created.
And yet we have all seen England struggle to create chances before. That in itself is nothing new, even with this much firepower on the pitch. What truly stands out from this game is England’s weakness at the back.
It was difficult to think of a worse England defensive performance than this in recent memory. In June 2022, they lost 4-0 to Hungary at Molineux in a Nations League game that saw the crowd turn on Southgate in a bitter, personal way. But that day Southgate chased the game in the second half and England conceded three late goals on the break.
England lost 2-1 to Greece on Thursday night (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Tonight the whole game felt like that. England were never more vulnerable than when they had the ball. Every time they lost it Greece broke straight through them. On another day, they would have scored five or six.
Watching Greece slice through England was to realise that maybe we got carried away last month. It was easy enough to assume that Carsley could take the good bits of the Southgate era — the team ethic, the defensive structure, the solid base — and add some tactical imagination on top of it. But here England had a surfeit of tactical imagination and very little else. Carsley had added the icing but lost the cake.
It made you realise that, for all the criticisms thrown at Southgate, there was a reason he had such a consistent record as England manager. Gazball was maybe not to everyone’s taste but England have never been better at calmly negotiating games like this than under their previous manager. The tangle Carsley got himself into when talking about the job afterwards was also a situation Southgate would never have found himself, given his knack of seemingly having a prepared answer for everything, and never starting a sentence unless he knew exactly how he would end it.
The good news is that England have another game on Sunday. HMS Carsball will be heading to Helsinki. This game could just be a bad one-off, a brave gamble that did not work. If Kane comes through training on Friday and returns to the team England will have their keystone back. If England can get back to the structure they showed in September, then there is no reason they cannot finish this Nations League campaign strongly.
But we will need to know what Carsley’s England at their best are meant to look like. Is this a team built on paper or a team built for tournaments? Does Carsley think that the problem with England at the Euros that they were too in awe of their creative stars, or not in awe enough? Does he know a route to winning a trophy that can bypass all of the methodical, functional aspects of the early Southgate era? These are the pressing questions, even more than whether he actually wants this job or not.
(Top photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
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