Being England interim manager feels like a tricky task for Lee Carsley.
Not because he’s not up to it, or genuine loons are pretending it matters whether he sings the national anthem or not. But because it’s going to be almost impossible to determine whether he’s up to it. Games like this facile win over Ireland just don’t feel like the kind of night on which it’s possible to learn a great deal about England’s prospective new manager.
England were, predictably, too strong and too canny for what is a really quite alarmingly non-vintage Ireland side and ran out comfortable 2-0 winners in Dublin. Could have been more, but the result rarely appeared in doubt from the moment Declan Rice scored a true ‘It just had to be him’ opening goal.
Viewed in the round, it’s the sort of victory familiar to all from assorted qualification campaigns down the years. But the problem for Carsley, after England’s really quite funny relegation to Nations League B, is that all his potential chances to impress this autumn are going to come on nights like this. If anything, the rest will be even lower key given this one at least comes with a degree of local rivalry.
The rest of this campaign comes against other teams of assorted levels of organisation and passion but always markedly lower on quality than England, just minus the niggle that at times threatened to keep this interesting.
It makes it hard to draw any meaningful conclusions about how good he can be. Unless England are rubbish and somehow mess up qualification from a group also containing Finland and Greece, then we won’t really know much at all.
And it still might get him the job anyway.
It means we’re all left having to pick up on tiny little hints and clues as to what Carsley’s England might look like in a tougher assignment. They are going to press from the front, which might quickly become a problem for Harry Kane who continued his baffling but concerted quest to become the international game’s pre-eminent walking footballer.
He was never rapid but he was always a striker in the ‘quick enough’ mould, which is palpably no longer true.
Trent Alexander-Arnold will play his Liverpool role rather than his Gareth Southgate one. He was given a free role here from right-back and given a quite absurd amount of time in which to pick out his Hollywood passes by an Ireland side who could be forgiven for being not as good as England but not really excused for the naivety and generosity so often on display in the first half.
The time given to Alexander-Arnold was compounded by Anthony Gordon frequently being given 50 yards of empty green grass into which to run on to the passes from Trent and others. If there was a truly significant performance to pick out here, one player who stands out as a significant early winner of the Carsley era, Gordon was probably it.
That work-rate is a significant weapon, and the sight of him ‘winning’ a footrace against Harry Kane with a 10-yard start to close down Caoimhin Kelleher felt like a weirdly significant moment for both men.
Ireland were better in the second half, inasmuch as they treated England with a bit less respect and were also a bit more willing to kick a shin or clip a heel when the chance or necessity arose.
The mute, tracksuit-clad Carsley, having so appallingly shat all over Gareth Southgate’s ‘singing the anthem while dressed like an English gentleman’ legacy did at least show some respect to his ‘forgetting you have substitutes’ legacy, making no changes until the 77th minute as the game was allowed to drift for just long enough to offer Ireland encouragement.
The changes restored some of England’s lost vigour, with Morgan Gibbs-White, Eberechi Eze and Jarrod Bowen all having their moments.
The changes, when they came, did also give us Declan Rice’s second Classy Touch of the evening, refusing the offer of the armband from the departing Harry Kane.
He’d already delivered a textbook respectful muted celebration after opening the scoring against the side he represented at youth levels and in friendlies before switching allegiance back to England.
We hate muted celebrations, but it was still interesting to see one in an international setting. That’s pretty rare, really, and Rice did it perfectly to make sure everyone could see exactly what he was doing, raising his hands and refusing to join in with any of his team-mates frivolity.
That’s always the key to getting the muted celebration just right. You must, must, must put, if anything, more effort into it than a regular celebration. There’s no point doing a respect if nobody realises you’re doing a respect.
Watching Rice’s celebration, we felt for the first time today a kinship with your Jason Burts and the Jeff Powells of this world. Is this what someone not singing the national anthem makes them feel?
We toyed with the idea of simply rewriting Burt’s entire piece but just plugging the words ‘Rice’ and ‘not celebrating a goal’ for ‘Carsley’ and ‘not singing the national anthem’, so consider yourselves fortunate we talked ourselves out of that. ‘If Declan Rice doesn’t celebrate goals, he can’t expect to play for England’ would certainly make for a punchy headline
Luckily, though, Rice’s celebration became important because it was followed by Jack Grealish’s adorably and inevitably regular celebration shortly after. It wasn’t exactly the Full Adebayor, but nor did he hold back after marking an otherwise patchy opportunity to pull the strings in a loosely defined No. 10 role that he has pretty much not been given for either club or country since his Villa days.
The contrast with Rice’s earlier reticence was almost impossible not to enjoy. They were the ideal goalscorers for England, the worst possible goalscorers for Ireland. Just a shame Eoin Morgan wasn’t on the bench to come on and add a third.
Carsley matches Sam Allardyce with one win from one game as England manager and with ‘not singing the anthem’ remaining the only thing anyone can currently pin on him it seems likely he’ll take the chance to extend that record next week, however much chagrin that causes Powell and co.
