It looked like Lee Carsley wanted to play Total Football - but England ended up as a total mess

From front to back and from start to finish, England’s dire display at Wembley on Thursday night was just about as bad a performance as any England side has been responsible for over the past decade or so. Lee Carsley’s bold idea to crowbar as many attacking players into the team as possible failed miserably and a far more organised and disciplined Greece side not only deserved to win, but could easily have won by far more than the odd goal. The only question is whether the real winner was Greece or Gareth Southgate.

For years, England’s old head coach was criticised for keeping the handbrake on, for being too conservative and too unwilling to find ways to bring more of the Three Lions’ immense attacking talent to bear. Against Greece, Carsley decided that we should finally see what a team with every available attacking option would look like and presented us with a team sheet that looked more like Garth Crooks’ Team of the Week than anything Southgate ever sent out onto the field. It looked as though he wanted to play Total Football. He ended up with a total mess.

Presumably, Carsley hoped that playing Jude Bellingham, Cole Palmer, Phil Foden, Bukayo Saka and Anthony Gordon all at the same time would result in a Cruyffian carousel of interlinking plays, with some of the most gifted attacking minds in European football dancing around the pitch, switching positions and dazzling the Greek defence into submission. Instead, it generally resulted in England having five players practically stood on each other’s toes, with no clear idea of their own position or anyone else’s. It was chaotic.

Bellingham, nominally the furthest forward but in practice operating as the falsest of nines, was the only England player able to make any sense of his role, finding occasional pockets of space and scoring his side’s distinctly undeserved equaliser. Foden and Palmer didn’t seem to have the faintest idea what their next move was whenever they got hold of the ball. Saka and Gordon were drawn into narrow areas repeatedly without anyone coming up behind them on the overlap. There was no width, no penetration, no visible passing scheme, and no clue.

Greece’s exceptionally well-drilled defence must have been bemused by what was going on in front of them for much of the match. Carsley presumably decided that the best way to deal with a deep low block was to play all of England’s forwards in front of it, but it didn’t work in the least. There was no option for a quick pass, nobody getting to the byline, no plan to hit Greece quickly and find gaps before their defence could form up into its dense ranks. It was entirely incoherent. Southgate’s tactical conservatism may have grated on many supporters, but it was essentially vindicated in the light of what the opposite ideology looked like.

What Carsley may well have learned from his experience is that playing such complex, freewheeling football takes time to figure out. Players need to have some idea of where their team-mates will be in relation to them once they get the ball, and need to know their role even in seemingly fluid formations. That can take months of practice to put together at club level, and few managers in history have really tried it. To believe that it would be possible to put it all together in three days of training sessions at St. George’s Park against an exceptionally well-organised team simply seems naïve.

Not that the attacking methodology was the only problem. The defence was abysmal. That partly reflected some distinctly dicey individual displays – Jordan Pickford, on one of those nights, was at his flapping, frantic worst – but also a set-up which left England undermanned whenever Greece hit them on the counter, which was often.

That Greece would play this way should have been obvious to anybody who watched even the highlights of their recent matches. Setting up to play in a very high 2-3-5 formation in possession simply seemed suicidal. Time and again, Greece won the ball and were able to pick a forward pass to a free man who would have just John Stones and Levi Colwill ahead of them, while team-mates rushed up quickly to help out. The amount of space offered was obscene.

It looked as though the idea was that Trent Alexander-Arnold and Rico Lewis would step up alongside Declan Rice to offer a solid base of possession, and that basic plan isn’t especially revolutionary – plenty of Premier League sides do something similar – but there seemed to be a lack of clarity over specific roles and passes forward were often either wayward or simply not on thanks to the confusion further downfield. That left England’s notional ‘midfield’ caught in possession time and again, and then caught too far upfield whenever they lost it.

To give Carsley a degree of credit, he seems willing to own his mistakes, and that reflects well on his character and willingness to foster a culture of accountability, at least.

“I thought it was important to try something different,” he told reporters in his post-match press conference. “I’m happy to take blame for that. It was totally my idea.”

It was a strange if undeniably gutsy choice to try something so alien to his players out halfway through what essentially amounts to the biggest job interview in English football. At least he showed the courage fans had so often demanded of his predecessor – if not necessarily much of Southgate’s sense. The real test of Carsley’s credentials may well come in Athens in November, when he will face the same challenge, away from home, knowing that his team will likely have to win to avoid spending another Nations League cycle in the second tier.

A willingness to try something bold should not necessarily be condemned, even if the execution was appalling. Carsley now has to prove that he can learn from his mistake and put together a coherent plan to beat a genuinely good Greek side next month – and to prove that he won’t allow one deeply dodgy performance to impact his side’s mental state going forward. A lot of people will have written Carsley off as permanent manager after Thursday night, but if he shows that he can take a mess and make something of it going forward, that would be a good way to demonstrate that he has the chops to do this for the long haul.