by And with the parp of the referee’s whistle, Conor Gallagher is out. England v Brazil is only seconds old, and already Gallagher is absolutely spinning, eating up the ground between himself and João Gomes. He has no real hope of winning the ball, which is long gone before it arrives. But just as a way to establish their presence, which shows intent. Planting the flag, as it were.
This, perhaps, is Gallagher’s defining motif in the mind’s eye: a midfielder whose dial is permanently set like a hurricane, always busy, always eager to be seen so busy, whether ostentatiously playing a five-yard pass or torn forward like a man chasing a runaway Mazda down a hill. He is one of the great guides of English football: constantly barking orders, alerting teammates to open space and free runners. Gallagher’s coaches love it because it makes them feel a little less empowered.
Related: Brazil star Endrick just found a goal to reverse England’s Euro 2024 exit
Then, of course, there is the scurrying. And maybe scurrying and punting are really two sides of the same coin: a player who operates on a permanent caffeine high. Something always needs fixing. Someone always has to be somewhere else. And inevitably the solution is always more running, more fighting, more basic alpha energy.
“You get players who look very flat,” Gareth Southgate once said of Gallagher. “And you can get players screaming around the pitch. And it’s a bit of a scurier.”
It may seem disrespectful to reduce this intelligent and versatile player to a simple foot-spinning unit. But scurrying has always been one of the game’s most underrated arts, and few international sides succeed without it. France boasts an entire lineage, from Christian Karembeu to Claude Makelélé to N’Golo Kanté to current holder Adrien Rabiot. The big Brazilian teams have always had excellent strikers: Clodoaldo, Mauro Silva, Gilberto Silva. Argentina has Rodrigo de Paul, Croatia has Marcelo Brozovic. And of course there were these players who could do much more, but whose function in that situation was to run and run, so that the stars could flourish.
Gradually, it is becoming clear who the star of this England team is. The more you look at Jude Bellingham these days, the more you realize how central he is to the whole enterprise, the linchpin, the orchestrator, the baller. Who helps him play?
Certainly on durability alone, Gallagher seems like a better bet in that role than Jordan Henderson or Kalvin Phillips. And yet it feels a slightly incongruous fit in an attack full of high-grade edges. Bellingham, Phil Foden, Bukayo Saka when he returns: these are all guys who play high-IQ football in not too tight spaces. Gallagher isn’t technically class enough, he isn’t good enough in possession to function as a deep play maker, he isn’t good enough in reading and anticipation to function as a holder.
There were some neat defensive contributions, as well as one nice run into the right which could have won a penalty. But he also gave the ball away more than any other player, he completed the lowest pass of any England starter Ollie Watkins, he made a mess of counter-attacks by taking too long to control the ball. And of course there’s a certain irony in the fact that what he did – a dummy that allowed a pass through to Bellingham – was clever in that he didn’t touch the ball at all.
Perhaps, to paraphrase Churchill’s famous speech, Gallagher has little to offer but blood, toil, tears, sweat and perhaps an early yellow card in a crucial knockout game. But there is another vision of England’s midfield out there, and with 15 minutes to play we caught a glimpse of it, as teenage super-boy Kobbie Mainoo jogged onto the pitch.
It must be said that Mainoo is not one of the game’s great guides. He is neither a screamer nor a scurier. If Gallagher tears and charges around the field, Mainoo slides around her like a chess piece. This is an economy of movement, an economy of touch. He played 15 accurate passes out of 15. He took one great turn to escape Gomes and put England on the attack. And of course, this was only his 24th game of senior professional football. The ceiling here is terrifying, the potential still unrecognizable, the relationships largely ungrooved.
-
Download the Guardian app from the iOS App Store on iPhone or the Google Play store on Android by searching for ‘The Guardian’.
-
If you already have the Guardian app, make sure you’re on the latest version.
-
In the Guardian app, tap the Menu button at the bottom right, then go to Settings (the gear icon), then Notifications.
-
Turn on sports ads.
Does this count against him or her? Maybe a bit of both. Southgate, in his bones, is neither a risk-taker nor a boat-rocker. Bellingham is now two tournaments away, but his place in the starting XI is not guaranteed until third this summer. The ghosts of Henderson and Phillips still linger around the place as if they had a foul smell.
And for all of Mainoo’s ability, for all the history available of teenage ballers ripping up major championships, if there’s every opportunity here to make a bold statement about the kind of team England want to be, it probably is. that there is a place on the edge around the biggest one. Can be expected.
You can keep your Trent Alexander-Arnold and Angel Gomes and your daring midfield experiment John Stones. So far, and in more ways than one, Gallagher makes the run.
