WHY JUDE BELLINGHAM SUSPENSION WOULD HAVE A SILVER LINING FOR ENGLAND

For 94 minutes, England had done their best to add another humiliating entry to their long list of dismal tournament defeats. In the 95th, Jude Bellingham showed he had cojones, and then he showed he had cojones.

With a moment of acrobatic ingenuity, Real Madrid's talisman sent tens of millions of football fans into pandemonium. Given how disappointingly England have played in Germany, Bellingham's strike is unlikely to prove to be the one that saves their summer, but that's a discussion for another day. For now, England are still in Euro 2024, and for those fans, Switzerland on Saturday is all that matters.

England's Struggles at Euro 2024

Three Lions squeezed into the last eight

Bellingham was a shining light for Real Madrid as they won La Liga as well as another European Cup last season, but Euro 2024 has not been his tournament. After 13 minutes against Serbia in England's Group C opener, it looked like it might be, but what transpired after that bullet header has not been pretty - for Bellingham or England.

England scored just once in the 350-plus minutes of game time between Bellingham's two strikes in Gelsenkirchen, and they have looked disjointed, imbalanced, and like a team that is very much less than the sum of its parts.

Sven-Goran Eriksson was criticised for trying to shoehorn all of England's best players into the same team during his spell in charge between 2001 and 2006. Under Eriksson, the conundrum surrounded how England would fit Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Paul Scholes into the same team. He never landed on an adequate solution. Perhaps there wasn't one.

Southgate faces a similar puzzle in trying to find room for Phil Foden and Jude Bellingham. Eriksson shunted Scholes out to the left wing and Southgate, so far, has taken the same approach with Foden. It's not working.

It is a strange quirk that most of England's best attackers are left-footed. Lefty quartet Foden, Bukayo Saka, Cole Palmer and Jarrod Bowen were all among the Premier League's top 11 scorers last season, but each player is at their least effective when they are operating off the left wing.

England's Lack of Balance in the Team

No width on left flank

Foden and Palmer are also used to operating more centrally for their clubs, and it is only due to Bellingham's brilliance that neither man has been given a chance to pull the strings for England from a central role this summer.

There is a chance, albeit it sounds like a small chance, that Bellingham will not be available for England against the Swiss. He is under investigation by UEFA for a hand motion he made after scoring against Slovakia, having gestured towards his crotch in the moments between the wild goal celebrations and the injury-time restart.

Suggestions surfaced online that Bellingham had made the gesture in the direction of the Slovakia bench, but the player soon came out on social media to say that wasn't the case, insisting that he had made the gesture in the direction of some friends who were in attendance.

It would be reductive to suggest that England would definitely perform better without Bellingham in the starting line-up, but there is little doubt that shifting Foden into a central position and utilising a more conventional winger like Anthony Gordon on the left flank would bring more balance to this team.

One of the major issues with Foden starting on the left wing is that he regularly drifts inside to more central areas, causing a lack of width in the team, which has so far been exacerbated by the right-footed Kieran Trippier playing at left-back and rarely overlapping.

Trippier has not looked comfortable throughout the tournament and the fit-again Luke Shaw could replace him against Switzerland. With Shaw and Gordon deployed down the left side of the team, England would have far more balance, and in taking the shackles off Foden, they would unleash a player who, like Bellingham, is capable of the unthinkable.

2024-07-03T03:51:17Z dg43tfdfdgfd