Jesse Lingard has been called up to the senior England team in the wake of injuries to Michael Carrick and Jamie Vardy. The question is, what has he done to deserve it? The stats offered by Goal.com don’t exactly suggest a watertight case for his inclusion, with Nathan Redmond and Marc Albrighton both providing more goals and assists respectively in the Premier League, while Wilfried Zaha and Jason Puncheon can boast far more Premier League minutes in Lingard’s position.
And so we come to the tired debate over whether playing for a big club means that international managers look a little more kindly on you, while the hard-grafting professionals in less glamorous sides can’t get their feet in the door. Although international management seems facile from a selection perspective (choose the best 23 players in the country and play them), the reality is rather more complex, as we shall see below.
Very few successful international teams are made up of players who don’t regularly play together. Germany’s starting XI in the 2014 World Cup final featured six Bayern Munich players (Neuer, Boateng, Lahm, Schweinsteiger, Kroos and Muller) and the scorer of the winning goal, Gotze, also played for Die Bayern. If we look back to the Spain team that won the 2010 edition, 12 of the 23-man squad played for either Barcelona or Real Madrid.
The lack of coaching time available to international managers means that philosophies are often based on successful club philosophies, as in the case of Spain’s implementation of Barcelona’s tactical blueprint. While there is no formula for international success, the less time that needs to be spent on familiarising players with each other or with a structure, the more time can be spent on refining the details required to win international tournaments.
England’s greatest strength, or so the marketing people at the Premier League would have us all believe, is that the league is one of the most competitive in world football, with four or five teams every year having genuine title aspirations. The national team’s stark international failures, with no trophy since the 1966 World Cup, have been put down to a variety of reasons, from players being played out of position (Paul Scholes being shunted to the right wing stands out) to managers who simply weren’t up to it (Steve McClaren and Graham Taylor, we’re looking at you).
But what if that failure could be put down to the fact that managers were forced to pick groups of players from five or six clubs, who only saw each other for a couple of weeks in international breaks?
Let’s look at England’s most recent ‘golden generation’. The team that would frequently line up for most of the 2000s was as follows: Seaman/James, Neville, Terry, Ferdinand/Campbell, A. Cole, Gerrard, Lampard, Beckham, J. Cole, Rooney, Owen. A few from Chelsea, a few from Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal . . . and this in a period of relatively consistent selection.
Jesse Lingard And Today's England Situation
Today’s England has Manchester City, Leicester, Tottenham and Everton all jostling for inclusion alongside players at the former ‘Big Four’ clubs. Roy Hodgson, admirably for many, has been willing to pick on form as well as selecting players who have performed well for England in the past.
But does the selection of Lingard show that Hodgson recognises the flaw in picking on form when it comes to long-term, tournament planning? After all, as the old adage says, form is temporary, class is permanent. What is the point in picking a few ‘hot’ players now if by the time the summer comes round, they’ve been injured or gone off the boil?
We can’t claim to know Roy Hodgson’s mind. But in promoting Lingard at the expense of some more proven players, there is an irresistible temptation to accuse him of a ‘big club bias’.
As we have suggested, such a bias need not be seen as a negative from an England perspective, as long as Hodgson is consistent. If Lingard doesn’t make an impact (or suffers the indignity of a Dele Alli-style 89th minute substitution), then all those fans baying for Hodgson’s blood will be justified.
But if this marks the beginning of Hodgson’s desire to narrow his selections to a single or dual-club core, England’s international fortunes could be for turning.
