Carsley is not the problem – something feels rotten at the core of this England | England

TThere is perhaps a certain bitter humor here in the fact that England's next opponent is the country that is widely regarded as the happiest country in the world. Finland is wealthy, equal, well-educated, socially supported and has hardly any global megalomania. It offers our own angry and perpetually troubled nation a wealth of useful life lessons, most of which you can be sure will go unheeded.

And so on to Helsinki, where Lee Carsley apparently only has three games left to save the job that apparently fell to him after two games, was taken away from him after three games and which he doesn't seem to want anyway. Perhaps given our apparent lack of enthusiasm for the Nations League format in general, it was inevitable that English football would use this autumn gap as an opportunity to focus entirely on itself and give full play to its rolling psychodrama, an extended Lee In to let/Lee Out referendum campaign.

The first point I have to make is that, for all the histrionic headlines that accompanied Thursday night's Wembley debacle, Ivan Jovanovic's Greek side are actually a lot better than a FIFA world ranking of 48th would suggest. After all, this was a team that had been on a steep upward trend for some time: a draw against France and outplaying Germany for long stretches of a 1-2 friendly defeat shortly before the European Championships.

According to the Elo rating – an ongoing and slightly stricter long-term measure of international performance – her triumph at Wembley actually put her in the top 20 in the world, ahead of countries such as the United States, Mexico, Sweden and Morocco. The same system actually rates current Greece as a better team than they were at the start of Euro 2004, a tournament they famously won.

Obviously you still expect England to beat them. On the pure expected goals scale – 0.84 to 0.74 in England's favor – this wasn't quite the drubbing it felt in real time, perhaps due to Greece's three disallowed goals. But perhaps this is a team that actually deserves some respect, rather than a litany of bad puns and team selection that reeks of Imperial disdain.

That brings us to a second, perhaps counter-intuitive point: England's system on Thursday night was less a case of poor conception than poor execution. If you put all the good attacking players together – with a plan, with the right drill, with pressing, determination and intensity and a feel for the little details – it can actually work. You defend high and as a unit you push the opponent into their own territory, starve them of the ball, suffocate them and then cut them to pieces with creativity. But of course this is a tactic that requires more than 20 minutes of practice.

It's clear that Carsley will take the bullets for this, and that's fair enough; It was a terrible depiction, terribly explained. But what stood out about England's performance against Greece was not just the incoherence but also the lack of drive and commitment. Pull out of tackles. Greek players will be allowed to dribble into dangerous areas with impunity. Lack of pressure on the person in possession of the ball.

Given the way England approached this game, there is probably no system in the world that would have won it for them. That may be Carsley's fault, but it's not just a systemic problem, and it certainly goes back further than this fall. On longer reflection, the game against Greece was simply part of a larger pattern of staid, incomplete and almost unreadable performances by England over the last 12 months. Something feels rotten at the core of this bunch, and in that context, Thursday's failed celebrity extravaganza felt like a logical progression rather than a wild anomaly.

You can see it in the lack of discipline, a habit that emerged during Euro 2024, like a surreal episode of Oprah. Harry Kane, you become number 10! Jude Bellingham, you'll be number 10! Phil Foden, you will be number 10! You can see it in the dull and erratic pressing, in the unmodulated effort, in the idea that tracking and covering is someone else's job. You can see it in the body language, which turns negative suspiciously quickly. And you could see it in Carsley's selection, which felt like an attempt to keep all the stars happy, an insult to the officer corps, Roberto Martínez with even less authority.

There was already a slight but clear homage to the biggest clubs. Levi Colwill and Noni Madueke are accelerated while Eberechi Eze and Jarrod Bowen are sidelined. An undercooked Foden plays in front of Ollie Watkins. Jack Grealish is coming straight back while James Maddison has to wait. Angel Gomes plays 90 good minutes against Finland and then no minutes against Greece.

Of course, there are long-term trends at work here. The team that Gareth Southgate took to Russia in 2018 had a total of one Champions League medal (by Gary Cahill) and 11 Premier League titles. The current squad has eight Champions League titles and 27 league titles (one of them in Spain). Higher standards; but also bigger expectations, bigger egos, a subtly different calculation about where international football stands in their legacy.

For years the focus of England's cultural development has been how we can keep these boys happy, at a time when reward and prestige are increasingly focused on club football. This was one of Southgate's great achievements, and by the end even he seemed a little lost in the cosmos, desperately trying to keep the circus going, a troupe of stars all convinced they had a unique lead character -Energy had.

When it works, your stars appear at crucial moments to drag you into a grand finale where you had no business being. The problem with this model, however, is that the effort depends on the circumstances. European Championship semi-finals: okay. UEFA Nations League Group B2 in October: Good luck with that. That's why a certain arrogance, a certain arbitrariness seems to have crept into the whole thing.

There is an old Finnish saying: This means that this is not the casewhich means “Happiness is a place between scarcity and abundance”. English football has enjoyed an abundance of talent and a lack of identity in recent years.

What they really need is a 2016-style cultural reboot, not the sad late-era Southgate, but the insurgent early Southgate. A coach who could take back control, slaughter a few sacred cows, reconnect the reality of playing for England with the idea of ​​playing for England and instill a sense of mission and purpose that goes beyond mere desire, to win something.

Most likely, Carsley isn't that guy. But who is then? A great foreign coach like Thomas Tuchel may bring the necessary authority, but not the sense of purpose or cultural change. Eddie Howe, Graham Potter, Steve Cooper: all good and all flawed in their own different ways. The coach England need now may not exist. There's a reason they called it the impossible job.