Nations League 2019: Same old story for England as midfield woes come back to haunt Gareth Southgate

The personnel were different but the problem was the same. England do not know how to keep the ball, do not know how to see out a win, and are nowhere near the technical level in midfield of cleverer, sharper opponents.

That was the story of their last semi-final defeat, to Croatia in the Luzhniki 11 months ago. And it was the story again here against Holland. Both times they started fast and took the lead in the first half. Both times they lost control of the game, teased one way and then the other by a smarter side. Both times they eventually crumbled in extra-time, worn down by their own mistakes.

In Moscow it was Jordan Henderson, Dele Alli and Jesse Lingard starting in midfield. In Guimaraes it was Declan Rice, Ross Barkley and Fabian Delph, with Lingard and Henderson on as second-half subs. But the effect was the same. No sustained spells of possession. No capacity to slow the game down. No one to compete with the opposition’s chief conductor. For Croatia it was Luka Modric. For the Netherlands it was Frenkie de Jong. Everyone knew what the problem was going to be, but that is very different from being able to stop it.

This was a different game from the Luzhniki; far more frantic, far more sloppy, far more error-prone. But in a sense it followed a similar pattern: England’s midfielders chasing the ball like three kittens after some wool, struggling to get the ball from their opponents, unable to do anything much with it when they did.

You can pick holes in individual performances if you want to. Rice took the first half to get up to the pace of the game. This was his second international start but the first was Montenegro and this was another level from that. He struggled to affect the game early on as it whizzed around him, and suddenly the jump up from playing for West Ham looked pretty big.

Barkley produced a classic Barkley display, two incisive passes through to Jadon Sancho and Jesse Lingard, and but for an unlucky VAR decision he would have got the assist for a thrilling England winner. But those two passes were at the start and the end of the 90 minutes and in between those two bookends he contributed little, often anonymous as the game happened around him.

Fabian Delph gave England the energy and aggression he always does and was one of their most impressive individuals on the night. But he was almost literally playing a different game from his midfield opponents. If Delph is about ‘the basics of football’, as he famously said on the Manchester City behind-the-scenes documentary, then De Jong is about the most difficult bits.

England do not have a De Jong but they cannot be expected to. Players like that only arrive once in a generation, and that is why Barcelona have paid €75million to sign him this year.

What England must do is find a way to keep the ball better with the players that they do have. And that is why the man who they most need in games like this was nowhere to be seen tonight. Harry Winks is England’s best possession player, a man who can link the play with his constant movement and little touches in the middle of the pitch. He has shown that for Spurs in recent years as well as for England. The best performance of the Southgate era – Spain away last October – featured Winks in the middle of the pitch.

But Winks missed the last two months of the season with a hip injury, recovering just in time to start the Champions League final last Saturday night. Before then Southgate decided that he would be one of the four players included in the initial 27-man squad who would not be in the final 23 that came to Portugal. But watching England struggle in possession, it was impossible not to wonder if they might have been better with Winks on the pitch.

England will not play a game this important for a whole year. The rest of their Euro 2020 qualification campaign should be manageable and then their group stage will start on 14 June 2020, in one year and one week’s time. That is the timeframe in which Southgate must land on a midfield that works, having spent the last year changing the players without really changing the outcome. Because the next time England play a semi-final – if it is Wembley on 7 or 8 July 2020 – they will need to do better than this.