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England thought they had their man – Lee Carsley just proved they do not

England thought they had their next permanent manager – the 2-1 defeat by Greece proved that the search is still on

What does the Football Association do now? Technical director John McDermott needs to get on his phone today and start arranging some meetings. Maybe he has already done that and kept it quiet. But, undoubtedly Lee Carsley has hugely damaged his chances of becoming England’s next permanent head coach.
Even if he breezes through the next three Nations League ties, even if England put five or six goals past their opponents with some scintillating attacking football – starting with Finland away on Sunday and then Greece away and the Republic of Ireland at home next month – there will always be Wembley, Oct 10, and this debacle to come back to haunt him.
No manager should be judged on one game. But this was a shambolic performance that cannot be easily dismissed. Carsley has already confirmed he has six matches – this Nations League campaign – to prove he is up to the job. And that makes sense. But this was a major setback. If it was an audition, he did not just fluff his lines, he indulged in some amateur dramatics.
This looked like the handiwork of an Under-21s coach going into a development game with an experimental formation and not really worrying about the consequences. Unfortunately for Carsley, this was the England senior team, this was a competitive fixture, and the consequences reverberate. There is no other way to describe it: this was an embarrassment.
So, what now for the FA? It has insisted it would run a process to find Gareth Southgate’s successor and that must include talking to other candidates. He cannot be a shoo-in. If it had hoped his step up from the Under-21s would be seamless, that these six Nations League ties would be a coronation, then that has been blown apart.
And, remember, England are not even in the top tier of the Nations League. They had been relegated from that. Their last campaign involved far more challenging fixtures against Italy, Germany and Hungary (10th, 13th and 32nd in the world). Now they are playing nations seeded 62nd, 64th and 48th.
Greece – that 48th country – have become the lowest-ranked team to beat England since Northern Ireland in 2005. And that game was in Belfast, not Wembley.
One of the criticisms levelled at Southgate was that England beat only the teams they were expected to beat – harsh and unfair and also an arrogant assessment.
Unfortunately, they have not even achieved that against the Greeks, who had never defeated England before and never even scored in this stadium. Here they had the ball in the net five times, with three efforts ruled out for offside, and fully deserved their historic victory.
The linesman comes to England’s rescue 😬 #ITVFootball | #NationsLeague. pic.twitter.com/R6hWGmG66A
It was 12 games into Southgate’s reign, picking up a shellshocked, confidence-shredded squad after the Iceland debacle at the 2016 European Championship, before England lost a competitive fixture. They were beaten by Belgium at the 2018 World Cup on their way to the semi-finals when pride was restored. Carsley has lost in what was his third game. Maybe being England manager is not the cakewalk some would claim it should be. Not that Carsley ever said it was.
This is certainly not to blame Carsley. The 50-year-old probably deserved his chance. Otherwise, what was the point of the coaching pathway with England and the FA and St George’s Park. It made sense to promote him, especially in the circumstances of Southgate’s departure. But maybe only for what he currently is: an interim.
“I was surprised after the last camp, ‘the job’s mine, it’s mine to lose’. My remit is I am doing three camps and then hopefully going back to the Under-21s,” Carsley said.
Hopefully? Maybe he mis-spoke and was simply being modest, but it sounded clunky as Carsley then stressed: “I don’t rule myself in or out.”
But does this defeat do just that? This is undeniably difficult to come back from. And that is where the FA needs to redouble its efforts to consider just who is the best candidate and make a thorough assessment. This is where McDermott needs to earn his corn. The clock is ticking.
Southgate stepped down in July. We are now in mid-October. The World Cup draw takes place in December. The qualification campaign starts in March. This is not a rehearsal.
Getting a Premier League manager – such as Eddie Howe or Ange Postecoglou, both on the FA’s shortlist – appears almost impossible.
There will be cries, once more, for an elite manager such as Pep Guardiola, but even if he wanted to leave Manchester City, the going rate is three or four times the £5 million the FA can pay. It absolutely cannot go above that, otherwise it is diverting precious finance away from its core work of providing pitches and coaches throughout the country.
The FA’s application process for the job closed on August 2 – which seemed precipitously early, given it was only a couple of weeks after the Euro final – but it is not a hard deadline. McDermott presumably has already gone through all those applications and considered who is worth speaking to as well as updated his own list and sounded them out. Otherwise, it is a dereliction of duty.
The FA insists that Carsley was always the contingency plan if, as happened, Southgate left. That is fair enough. It insists it never meant the job was automatically his, even if there was always the sneaking suspicion it wanted it to be. Now that has changed. Carsley may turn it around. But it feels like a long way back from this. The question needs to be answered. What is the FA going to do?
England 1 Greece 2

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