The way the game is now it is more about the squad than it has ever been. I had no issues whatsoever with our starting 11, in fact it was good to see an unchanged team. My issue is as the game went on it obvious the selection was not working, whether that was because of fatigue, because we underestimated the Us, because the US were very good I don’t know, but it wasn’t working. Now when you have 5 possible changes there is no excuse to allow a game to drift in the way that we did tonight and that is my biggest criticism, Southgate did nothing to try and make a difference.
As I said earlier the Henderson sub was completely understandable but it was so clear that Sterling, Saka, Kane and Mount were not being productive, that doesn’t mean they should never play for England again, it doesn’t mean they are poor players it just means they were having an off night and it means it is ok to change them, especially when we have quite a few decent attacking players.
Onwards and upwards, yes we’ve pretty much qualified but will continue to struggle until we grasp the nettle when it comes to being proactive to changes and try to change games.