Youthful England will not feel the weight of history in seismic showdown with Germany

Gareth Southgate joked his players don’t know Winston Churchill, but references to 1996 and their manager’s penalty miss are almost as irrelevant as references to real history

In the England camp, there are no nerves, or trepidation.

“It is just more excitement,” Luke Shaw explains. “We’ve been saying we wish the game was sooner.”

The players are eager for this last-16 match to start. Whether they’re ready for it is a different issue, and probably the biggest question going into this grand rematch with Germany.

A game like this has been a long time coming. That means more than the week since the last group game against Czech Republic, the 11 years since a tournament match with Germany, or even the 25 years since we saw a game of this magnitude on English soil.

It is three years since the team's last sudden-death knockout match, or any kind of game of true consequence. These players have of course played many such games for their clubs, but very few as a group.

Gareth Southgate’s main preparation plan for this week, and most of the last three years, has been priming them for this. He, his assistant Steve Holland and the rest of the staff have spent countless hours researching how to build for tournaments, how to grow within tournaments, looking at everything from previous tactical approaches to optimum physical programmes. Then there are the specific psychological challenges.

“It’s something we’ve been working on,” Southgate said. “There are different challenges as we’ve seen within the last 48 hours: how you recover from a setback with a freak goal; how you recover from a red card… you’ve got to ride those moments and make sure as a team you react well to those moments.”

It is why the debate about England’s football at this tournament has extra depth. They have been constrained. Even Southgate has admitted that.

There has been a certain amount of design to that, though. Southgate wants the players to have the energy to go the distance. The aim is to release it at the right moments, both in matches, and in the competition itself.

Southgate’s ideal is that England are capable of “storming” sides of Germany’s quality, to suddenly burst from the press in the way the best Premier League sides do, and ultimately overwhelm them.

The players certainly have the capability for that. Whether Southgate has the ability to execute it is another big question. England have really only had about two such performances against top opposition in his five years, with the 3-2 away to Spain the example to follow.

As with so many issues, Southgate talks such a good game. The reality of many of his actual matches is often different.

That’s what this game represents more than anything, in the way only a big tournament knock-out fixture can. It is reality, 90 minutes that will either completely dispel three years of dreams or fully display that this team has what it takes.

The wonder is whether England can lift it quickly enough.

Southgate hasn’t sought to lean on history to rouse them.

The line about Germany caring much less about the history of a game with England than one with the Netherlands or Italy is by now well known, but the modern English players care even less than that. This fixture just doesn’t mean the same that it used to for players of the past.

“It's of no consequence to them what we did in 1996 or Peter Bonetti in 1970 and what happened in 1990 and so on,” Southgate said.

This isn’t to say that football history means nothing. It amplifies the atmosphere. It enriches the occasion for everyone watching.

For the players, though, references to even 1996 and their manager’s penalty miss are almost as irrelevant as references to real history.

“The majority of players don’t even remember that game,” Harry Kane said. “A lot of them weren’t born. I think I was only three.”

Ridiculous chants about 10 German bombers are as mystifying to them as they are to the opposition. When Southgate was asked whether he feels the need to get “Churchillian” ahead of these matches, he quipped: “Churchill would be another figure that probably doesn’t figure highly about the players.”

All the old tropes around this fixture just don’t apply. The squads belong to a very different world.

That is emphasised by two stats, that were touched on by Jurgen Klopp’s WhatsApped emoji to Jordan Henderson once the tie was confirmed. When the two countries last met in a tournament in 2010, it wasn’t just that there were no German managers in the Premier League. Neither squad had a single teammate from the other side.

For Tuesday, 11 English players do and eight German players do, before you even get to those who have played together in the past. It reflects the depth of integration between the two football cultures, to the point they now greatly influence each other, and old ideas of supposed national traits have been completely eroded.

Firstly, the FA directly took lessons from Germany’s coaching revolution, and even have a memorandum of understanding.

“We’ve actually got a really close working relationship with the DFB off the pitch in many other areas,” chief executive Mark Bullingham says.

The rapid development of the German game has led to their pressing becoming the dominant form of football, as best exemplified by a Premier League club in Liverpool. This is specifically what Southgate would idealise, as he now sees it as an English strength. This is what is meant by “storming” Germany. It emphasises how it’s all turned, and become intertwined. A combination of many of these elements has seen England produce an abundance of fast wide forwards, of exactly the type that the German system has lacked, that may hurt them on Tuesday. It has led Bundesliga clubs to target players like Jadon Sancho, and led their youth chiefs to start studying what England is doing. There is a feeling the German production line has gone stale, which can be seen in some of the gaps in this team. They are now looking to England for lessons.

All of this has seen the tropes about the teams subverted too.

While England are defined by structure, Germany are a disparate group with a lot of individual quality but little cohesion or tactical nuance.

In other words, England are like a 1990s Germany, and Germany are like a 2000s England.

Could that lead to a new type of game? That is what makes this so engaging, so enticing, and why these specific types of tournament knock-out games are so invigorating.

"It's always difficult to predict because you can have a vision of what a game will be like, and then events happen, or things happen in games and they go on a path of their own,” Southgate said. “It's two teams that are strong, athletic, with good technical players, but the flow of a game: that's the beauty of football.

“It's very difficult to predict what kind of a night you are going to get. It's knock-out football, that's the thrill of it. But we know the things we're prepared for and we also know that reacting well in those moments that can happen in knock-out games is really important to progressing in the tournament.”

Sources have said that Southgate has been considering a return to three at the back, and pure pace up front, in order to keep solid and try and expose Germany’s defensive fragility. That may well involve Kieran Trippier and Luke Shaw out wide, the usual double pivot of Kalvin Phillips and Declan Rice, with Bukayo Saka and Raheem Sterling either side of Kane.

That is at least one option Southgate has been thinking about, and is close to the Portuguese and French model he feels is so effective in tournament football. Among a few issues, though, is that Euro 2020 has illustrated the limitations of this approach. Germany specifically did that to Portugal in the group stage, devastating them.

Might such a game be playing into Joachim Low’s hands? The feeling on the German side is that they will go at England from the start, and seek to test them mentally, to use their greater experience. Thomas Muller’s return is seen as crucial in that regard. Low himself has also been considering bringing Leon Goretzka in for Ilkay Gundogan in midfield, with a Bayern Munich triangle on the right of Goretzka, Muller and Joshua Kimmich potentially causing all manner of trouble for England. Southgate certainly may have to do something different in the middle, since it doesn’t feel Phillips and Rice – or whatever potential combination – can win that midfield battle in terms of pure play.

But that is precisely why Southgate has been using the group games to prepare for these challenges, to offer England a different level of control. Picking Saka would meanwhile show considerable tactical bravery.

That is what this game is ultimately about, asserting yourself, not fearing the past. This was a tone that Marcus Rashford struck early on in the week. “There is no point fearing the past,” the forward said. “You can't go back and change it. What we can change is the result of the next game.”

Southgate sounded a similar rallying call. He dismissed any talk of penalties, or his own past. He was only pointing to what’s possible, what’s exciting.

“These sorts of landmarks are always opportunities,” the manager proclaimed. “Every time you play for England you have an opportunity to score a goal or create a moment that lives with people forever. That is to be cherished, really. That is what presents itself tomorrow.”

It can’t come soon enough.