It’s Arrogant and Naive to Expect England to Be Impressive in Qualifying

After the East Berlin uprising of 1953, Bertolt Brecht wrote his poem “The Solution,” in which he made the suggestion that the government should dissolve the people and elect another.

Successive England managers must, less ironically, feel something similar. The public and its reaction to the national team—and the media are implicated in this, simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the public’s mood—are largely ridiculous.

England did not play particularly well in Trnava, Slovakia, on Sunday. The game was boring. That seemed to make people angry. But what did they expect? Had they not watched Slovakia at Euro 2016? Had they not seen how good they were at sitting deep and killing the game? Did anybody really sit down to watch that game expecting a free-flowing exhibition of end-to-end football?

In the past two years, Slovakia have beaten Spain and Ukraine in qualifiers, Germany in a friendly and Russia at a major tournament. They are not useless, glorified traffic cones to be picked around by the deft feet of English geniuses. They are a decent international side, adept at frustrating opponents, and in Marek Hamsik, they boast a genuine star.

This was, according to the seedings, the hardest game England will face in qualifying. Sam Allardyce’s men were largely frustrated, but they battled gamely away, hit the woodwork, forced the dismissal of an opponent and ultimately won the match.

With Slovenia only drawing away to Lithuania, there is already breathing space. England can afford a slip-up somewhere and still expect automatic qualification for the World Cup. Even a draw would have been a good result.

It’s true England were helped by the timidity of Slovakia’s approach—and you can only assume Jan Durica’s shameful claims, relayed by Samuel Stevens of The Independent, that Martin Skrtel was the victim of referee bias when the former Liverpool man seemed to spend the entire game looking to be sent off was an attempt to deflect domestic criticism—but still, they dominated the game to the extent they had 20 shots to Slovakia’s 1. They were extremely unlikely to lose.

We’ve seen this before. In the third-to-last qualifying match for the last World Cup, former boss Roy Hodgson had his side shut down in the away game against Ukraine, coming away with a 0-0 …

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