By Frank Dalleres
You might have been given the impression that England losing to Iceland – a team ranked below Jordan and Montenegro – in their last match before Euro 2024 was a bad thing.
Certainly if you were among the 81,410 people who traipsed to Wembley to watch the Three Lions dish out a mauling only to see them turn into pussycats, you might feel a little cheated.
The boos that rang out at full-time on Friday night after Gareth Southgate’s team managed a grand total of one shot on target told their own story. But hang on a minute.
As a nation, we are prone to overestimating the national team’s chances before a major tournament. We’re absolute suckers for it.
It takes very little for England to puff out its collective chest and break into a refrain of It’s Coming A Home (ironic or otherwise) as a European Championship or World Cup approaches.
So if losing the most meaningless of meaningless friendlies on the eve of the squad’s departure for Germany douses the raging flames of hype, it may not be a bad thing after all.
After all, the drumbeat had been relentlessly optimistic from an England point of view since the countdown to Euro 2024 began.
Bookmakers quickly installed them as favourites, an indication not only of the number-crunchers’ calculations but also the delusional level of appetite for backing them.
Upon announcing his long-list for the tournament last month, even the cautious Southgate was forced to admit that, yes, they could lift the trophy in Berlin on 14 July.
That excitement reached hysterical levels last week when every man and his dog pronounced that this one was England’s to lose.
Harry Redknapp declared the English squad to be the best by a distance, adding that anything less than winning the competition ought to be deemed a failure.
On top of that, the supercomputers and AI-driven algorithms began blithely churning out predictions that the Three Lions had the best chance of any team.
Now, England are indeed good and certainly one of the contenders for Euro 2024. A 1-0 defeat to a low-ranking opponent doesn’t change that.
They can boast Jude Bellingham, Harry Kane, Phil Foden, Bukayo Saka, Declan Rice, John Stones and Kyle Walker, players who would get into most sides in the world.
And Southgate deserves far more credit for the job he has done than many are willing to give him, partly because he eschews the hyperbole and everyman logic of a Redknapp.
But let’s get it right. France – not England – have the best squad at Euro 2024 by any dispassionate analysis, while Portugal and Spain are also abundantly gifted.
With Kylian Mbappe and Antoine Griezmann, their attacking players are as good as anyone’s but their defence and midfield look far more solid than Southgate’s.
Another factor that can’t be overlooked is that France’s coach Didier Deschamps and seven of his players have tournament-winning experience from the 2018 World Cup.
What’s more, as a nation they have a history of achievement. In the last 30 years they have won three major tournaments and reached the final of three more.
In that period Spain have also won three, Italy have won two and reached two finals, while Germany have one win and two runner-up finishes.
England, by comparison, have made one final, in 2021, when they played the vast majority of their games at home. That is simply not the same pedigree as the other contenders this summer.
To his credit, that record has improved markedly under Southgate, reaching the semi-finals in 2018 and only losing at the last World Cup to eventual finalists France (yes, them again).
He took over not long after their modern nadir: that second-round defeat by Iceland at Euro 2016 which consigned Roy Hodgson’s utterly uninspiring reign to the dustbin.
Friday’s reminder of that dark day might be the reality check that England – the nation even more than the squad – needs before this week’s big kick-off.
