Leave out Palmer and start a Newcastle starlet? What we learned from Lee Carsley's England

The interregnum is over, and Lee Carsley’s brief tenure as England head coach is over – six matches, five wins and one abject mess later, he will hand the keys to the kingdom over to Thomas Tuchel and return to the Under-21s, safe in the knowledge that he succeeded in guiding the Three Lions back into the top tier of the Nations League.

Tuchel wasn’t at Wembley to watch his future charges dismantle the ten men of the Republic of Ireland in a second-half brutalisation, but will apparently receive a full handover from Carsley before the start of the forthcoming World Cup qualifying campaign – but what exactly will be in that handover? What did we, and Carsley himself, learn from a short spell in charge in which all of the matches were played against weaker sides?

Someone has to stay on the bench

For the most part, Carsley did his job very well. He succeeded in shepherding some of his young charges from the age group sides towards the senior team and managed to rustle up two convincing wins when the chips were down in his last two matches. Unfortunately, he will also be remembered for the night that Greece deservedly won at Wembley for the first time, as England offered up their worst performance since the European Championship exit to Iceland all the way back in 2016.

Against a disciplined and compact Greek team, Carsley decided to answer a question many England supporters had posed on social media during the Gareth Southgate years – what would happen if we just played all of our best players at the same time, tactics and formations be damned?

Jude Bellingham, Cole Palmer, Bukayo Saka, Phil Foden, Cole Palmer and Anthony Gordon all played alongside each other, and the result was utter chaos. Observers who believe that tactics are over-rated and that the best players could figure it out for themselves got one in the eye. The strategy geeks among us earned a convincing victory. It was an unholy mess, with players seemingly bereft of any idea as to where they were meant to go or where the next player might be.

Assuming Tuchel wisely determines that an attacking free-for-all is not the way to go, then, he will have learned that some very talented players simply have to be left on the bench. If Bellingham plays at ten and Saka plays wide right, as they have earned the right to, then there probably isn’t a place for Palmer regardless of how good he is. Gordon and Foden simply don’t belong in the same team. Harry Kane ties it all together most of the time, but his inclusion comes at the cost of someone else who is probably extremely good.

It's a lovely problem for Tuchel to have, really – England simply have too many world-class (or adjacent) attacking players to play them all. Someone who deserves to start every game will ride the bench in big matches, and the England fans will complain about it, especially if they don’t win. One thing Tuchel will learn quickly is that the player who doesn’t start was the key all along if results go south. But he will also come into the job with clear evidence that treating England squad selection like it’s Garth Crooks’ Team of the Week won’t cut it.

England need balance out wide

Carsley had quite a few likely starters out with injuries of one kind or another over his short spell as head coach, but perhaps the most impactful absence was that of Manchester United left-back Luke Shaw.

Without him, Carsley tried a couple of different right-footed players out on the left with identical results – whether it was Trent Alexander-Arnold or Rico Lewis, having a left-back who can’t provide an overlap and who instinctively cuts back inside every time they have possession makes the team too narrow and too predictable in attack.

The issue was compounded by the presence of Gordon in the front three. Right-footed and looking to cut back towards the middle of the field himself, the result of playing without a natural left-footer was that England barely had a left flank at all.

Shaw may well recover from his recent injury worries, and Lewis Hall gave a good early account of himself after being handed a debut by Carsley, so there are answers out there. Perhaps Ben Chilwell will one day emerge blinking into the light after a spell in the oubliette that Enzo Maresca installed especially for him at Stamford Bridge. There may even be an argument for giving Palmer, a natural leftie, a go out on that flank with a player like Lewis behind him to see if that helps to even everything out.

But Tuchel must see that playing two right-footed players down the left simply hasn’t worked out, and has restricted the team’s ability to create and exploit space going forward – as well as giving any slightly older fans damaging flashbacks to the pre-Ashley Cole era, when England managers spent years roaming the lands in search of any honest man in possession of a left foot, and generally drew a blank.

Harry Kane is still good – even when he’s bad

England captain Kane has certainly proven his credentials as a cheerleader for the side, berating players who withdrew through injury not long after he had stayed with the squad despite picking up a knock while playing for Bayern Munich ahead of the second international break of the season back in October.

Happily, he also proved that he’s still a great player… or did he? After his lacklustre showings during Euro 2024, there was pressure on him to perform and those with knives out and sharpened saw the same lack of pace and seeming inability to get into dangerous areas in the box. But he still wound up as England’s leading scorer in the Nations League with three goals to his name.

Perhaps more importantly, while Ollie Watkins had his moments (and scored two goals of his own), Kane was clearly better at finding ways to link up with his team-mates. It was his superb ball into Bellingham which both earned England a crucial penalty in Sunday evening’s win over Ireland and that was just one of a number of nice interlinking moves in which Kane played a part.

Watkins, by comparison, has been dangerous as a fox in the box for England but hasn’t been able to find ways to contribute towards the build-up. He may be quicker and better off the ball than Kane, but even when Kane is below his best, he still makes things tick as a playmaker and remains a ruthless finisher.

For all that faults may be emerging as he gets nearer to his footballing dotage, England still look better and work better as a team with Kane, and he has the tools to bring out the best in the luxuriously talented attacking players around him. Given that Carsley benched Kane for last week’s game against Greece only to restore him to the line-up three days later, one suspects that the outgoing coach arrived at a broadly similar conclusion. Perhaps it’s a thought that he’ll pass on, just after he’s finished wearily telling Tuchel about the ins and outs of whether he should sing the national anthem. God Save the Kane...