We find ourselves at this quite familiar but no less dreadful post-tournament juncture. For the fourth time out of the last five tournaments (if you include the non appearance in 2008) England have found yet another new and ingenious way of shooting themselves in the foot despite pre-tournament expectations being relatively modest. As is familiar, blame has been attached. Fingers are being pointed. Review panels set up. Groundhog day. Fans, pundits, journalists and the majority of those working within the game are all united in their vitriolic criticism of where England went wrong and what could be done better. Roy Hodgson took the blame, as any noble ship captain should do; but it still doesn’t excuse the fact that he failed dismally in three crucial areas: tactics, personnel and tone; the cornerstones of any successful tournament.

Now you don’t have to have the acumen of an astrophysicist in Space to establish that the tactics, personnel and tone were all wrong. Such base analysis has been bandied around more than in an extended game of pass the parcel. But what do people mean when they are talking about such factors, and are they correct? It’s all well and good saying Hodgson didn’t have a clue or looked like a naive owl perched on the subs bench (someone else’s words not mine) but rarely are they backed up with forthright analysis as to why he got it so wrong and why we once again failed so dismally. So I’m going to try my best to dissect and explain the intricacies of these factors considering what Hodgson was trying to achieve. Whilst I understand there remains criticism regarding the structure of English football, the FA and the players who travelled to France, in this article I am going to be talking exclusively from the point of view of Roy Hodgson. Of course I could very easily make this a subjective piece where I pick the tactics and players I wanted, but I wasn’t England manager and therefore it would explain nothing about why we crashed out prematurely.

Tactics:

One of the major reasons we crashed out was because Roy did not know his best 11. I would be the first to say that not knowing your best 11 is not the worst thing in the world as the mere connotation of the phrase ‘not knowing your best 11’ fails to allow for the fact that you may have 23 players who are all in form. However, even trying to shoehorn in-form players into positions and a system they are not comfortable with is always likely to be counter-productive. But I stop short at saying that Hodgson didn’t have a preferred formation in mind.

While watching the BBC’s autopsy on the England/Iceland game I found myself disagreeing with aspects of what Alan Shearer and Rio Ferdinand felt wrong with England. Although it should be noted that I agreed with a large share of what they had to say, I felt that they hadn’t been watching the same England I had for the last two years. Shearer contended that Roy Hodgson ‘didn’t have a system, didn’t know his best players, [and was] tactically inept’ whilst Ferdinand felt ‘If you go into a tournament and you don’t know your best team and you don’t know your best formation you’re running into trouble’. Didn’t know his best team? Tick. Didn’t know his best system? Debatable. Personally, I found these emotive answers were simply given because they were headline grabbing and ultimately catering to what the public wanted to hear. I contend that Roy Hodgson did know his best formation; it was 4-3-3, however the players selected simply did not fit that blueprint. You intend to play a system such as 4-3-3 but bring in Sterling as the only out and out winger? Where is the thought process in that?

Nevertheless he desperately tried to shoehorn players into that shape and system; the pre-tournament friendly against Portugal where Vardy and Kane were found on the wings demonstrated that in the clearest way possible. Similarly half the qualifying games were moulded into a 4-3-3, with the other half being a jamboree of formations that were quite clearly experiments in a straightforward qualifying group. This gives us an insight into Hodgson’s preferred tactical framework. But Hodgson simply did not have a tactical framework that he preferred; he had a structure and an idea of how England should have played within a 4-3-3 system. The three in midfield consisted of a deep lying playmaker (nominally Jack Wilshere) but we saw Michael Carrick and even Jonjo Shelvey deputise at times, complemented with two ‘work horse’ midfielders such as Delph, Henderson or Milner who would seek to drop into the space left by the more creative midfielder driving forward or looking to play a forward pass. This was largely abandoned by the March friendlies when new, different and sexier midfield options presented themselves and made it harder for Hodgson to champion the likes of Wilshere (injured), Carrick (34 by Euro 2016) and Jonjo Shelvey (uninspiring form for Newcastle). A loyalist in regards to system but clearly not enough when it came to selecting a player to fit his blueprint for how he wanted England to play. If he had been more forthright and stuck to his guns, he would have selected Wilshere or even Rooney as the deepest of the midfielders with two water-carrying type midfielders who would be asked to instil a pressing game. This may not necessarily have been the most popular option amongst us, but at the very least you could not accuse England and Hodgson of going to the Euros without knowing their best formation and most likely his best team.

Instead, he dabbled with both 4-3-3 and a 4-4-2 diamond prior to the tournament but was never fully convinced by the latter and thus persevered with 4-3-3. In fact we only really saw a 4-4-2 diamond in the second half against Wales – and even then that was when he threw the Kitchen sink at them. The proposition that Roy could have used more tactical variations towards a 4-4-2 diamond or a 4-2-3-1 is one which has also been circulated, but at what point do you draw the line between tactical flexibility and tactical naivety? Although it was never a question that needed asking, neither system was deployed by Hodgson due to the narrowness of the diamond (which ironically was exactly our problem at the Euros) and Hodgson’s pessimistic feelings surrounding 4-2-3-1 after the last World Cup. I myself thought that a 4-4-2 diamond was the most likely system that Hodgson was going to use in the tournament due to the players he selected to make up the 23, but I suppose therein lies the problem; he had a set of players that he felt was going to excite and inspire a nation but could not quite take the final leap of faith and play them in a system that suited the personnel (but more on that to come in part 2).

The fact that Hodgson became fixated on 4-3-3 coupled with the emergence of almost too many players that happened to both be in form and playing in the same position meant that doing well in the tournament was always going to be an uphill battle. And what an uphill battle we created for ourselves. Hodgson stuck by 4-3-3 but, without the players to fully utilise the benefits of the system, we found ourselves lacking width and out of the tournament. Hodgson should have either sacrificed his ideal system for his ideal set of players to fit that system or vice versa. By no means is it a failure to change a tactical system so close to a tournament, despite the backlash that would undoubtedly come the managers way. Lois Van Gaal went down that route after Kevin Strootman was ruled out of the 2014 World Cup, and look where Holland finished – with arguably one of the worst Dutch teams to play in the finals. The England manager had neither the guile nor the sheer bloody mindedness to make such a change. It all painted a miserable picture; Hodgson’s inability to sacrifice his ideal tactical system for the right personnel was always going to lead to another Roy-al disaster. And so it proved.

I was hoping to include my thoughts regarding tactics, personnel and tone into 1 ‘feature length’ article however, due to the sheer amount of content I have decided to split this article into 3 parts. So please come back and check for part 2 (personnel) and part 3 (tone) if you enjoyed reading this.