In his exclusive column for CaughtOffside, former Aston Villa attacker Stan Collymore discusses some of football’s biggest talking points, including why PSR must change, why Southgate should have led with a radically different message pre-Euros, why Liverpool won’t make a statement Euros signing and much more.

The reality is that where you play in, for instance, the Premier League and La Liga, and you have 10 years of a cycle where it’s Premier League, Euros, Premier League, year off so we’ll go on an end-of-season tour, Premier League, World Cup, it’s going to tell. For Jude Bellingham, he hasn’t had that, so he doesn’t get the Harry Kane (who’s played a lot of football over a number of years) excuse. He’s 20 years of age. Phil Foden has played a lot of football.
But, you can acknowledge that the players are mentally and physically fatigued and then acknowledge with equal legitimacy that it’s down to the manager to bring in fresh players that maybe haven’t played as many minutes, that are younger and haven’t been around the block like Harry Kane over a number of years… Cole Palmer, for example, looks fresh despite playing a lot of minutes last term. Anthony Gordon had injuries, played a lot of minutes but he should be fresh. It may well be that England moving forward, even if we bring in a Pep Guardiola or a Jose Mourinho to manage the side (and I’m sure they’ll be touted as names down the line), there’ll still be the challenge of mentally and physically fatigued players to handle.

I look at my own club, Aston Villa, and Unai Emery is one of the ones who comes out and says it as it is. Fullbacks, likely to bomb on, ‘Give me 60 minutes’. Then almost on 60 minutes, he will change one or both fullbacks. That means you’re playing two-thirds of the season effectively and should mean that as you get to the end of the season you remain fresher. It may be the case of saying, “Jude, Harry, Phil, Bukayo Saka – you’re our star men. Give me 60 minutes.” What does that say to the players? They’re not playing 90 and then after the hour mark, the cavalry will come. If Gareth had offered that message to the press before the tournament and acknowledged the fatigue hurdle, we might be sitting here viewing the situation very differently. We play at an intensity that other countries don’t. You see that Georgia performance? Wonderful! But they don’t play in the same arena that we do week in, week out with the same pressures and mental and physical load. It should have been about telling these key players to give it high intensity, give everything, for 60 minutes and if they’re dying at 60 minutes – the cavalry, in the form of Anthony Gordon, Cole Palmer, Kobbie Mainoo, whoever, comes on.

Gareth could have sold that as a reason. I think fans would have then bought that and thought, “Okay, it’s 0-0 against Slovenia, but the cavalry’s coming on at 60 minutes to change things.” At the minute, we don’t know who’s coming on or when, or the thought process behind it. Southgate’s already abandoned his great midfield experiment in Trent Alexander-Arnold, Conor Gallagher came in and Gareth took him off… all of a sudden Gareth has gone from a position where he could have said, “60 minutes, the top stars are out to keep them fresh”, to now looking like a reactive manager. That’s a problem. The narrative is a problem. We could have England move forward in the the tournament with a 1-0 here and a 0-0 there in our fourth tournament with Gareth where we’ve had the good side of the draw, all four tournaments, and not won something. Southgate is usually very good at messaging but he could have said, “Our stars have played more minutes, they’re definitely more fatigued, I’ve listened to what they’ve said and I’m gonna give them 60 minutes in the group games and we’ve got more than enough ability to come on.” If he’d done that, I think we may have got better results, scored more goals, given our big players a rest and reduced the hassle on his back.



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