Manager Gareth Southgate is ready to make changes for England’s final group game against Slovenia and has expressed concerns about the fitness of some of his players, including Harry Kane.
England manager Southgate may also be forced to change his plans due to concerns over Luke Shaw and is expected to make changes to his starting XI after admitting his line-up did not perform as expected in Thursday’s 1-1 draw with Denmark, but said fitness issues could affect his line-up.
Southgate suggested Kane, who was substituted against Denmark and missed Bayern Munich’s final two Bundesliga games of the season with a back injury, was not injured but not fully fit to take part in the match.
Kane is part of England’s senior leadership group, along with vice-captain Kyle Walker, Declan Rice and Jude Bellingham, who urged their teammates to stay calm and not panic after Thursday’s draw. The senior leadership group expressed confidence that both the performance and result would be good.
Telegraph Sport report that Southgate’s initial plan was to use Shaw as a reserve for England’s third and final Group C match against Slovenia, to help the left-back play the full game ahead of the knockout stages.
But Shaw trained indoors again on Friday rather than outdoors with the players who did not play in the dismal draw with Denmark, raising doubts over his availability for even a few minutes, even as a substitute, for next Tuesday night’s game against Slovenia in Cologne.
Southgate identified a lack of pressing as one of his biggest concerns after struggles against Serbia and Denmark and expressed fears that “limited” fitness was affecting his players’ concentration during the two matches.
“We’re not putting enough pressure on ourselves.”
Southgate accepted responsibility for the draw with Denmark and will be pondering how best to refresh his starting XI after using the same line-up for the first two matches of the tournament.
“It’s because we’re not pressing them enough, with enough intensity,” Southgate said when asked why England lost steam after taking leads in both games. “With the physical situation we’re in, we can only press so much, we can’t press high up the pitch like we could in the qualifiers, for example.”
“And we’re not keeping the ball well enough. That’s it. We need to keep the ball better, control it more and build, so we’ll be less defensive and more confident.”
“We will review everything. We felt that the right way to go about it was to give confidence to the players we selected for the first game. We won our last game and we are very happy with the contribution of the players who played in the last game. So we have to go through the same process after this game. We will look at the performance, look at the next opponent and find the best solution for the next game.”
Southgate said Kane had been substituted in the second half of the Denmark game because he has only played one full game since returning from a back injury late in the season.
“The front three played the majority of the other game and we felt they needed to get a few more feet on the pitch,” Southgate said. “Harry has only played 90 minutes in the last five or six weeks and given how tired we were in the last game and the heat in the Denmark game, I always thought we needed to apply more pressure towards the end of the game and maybe all those front three needed to be refreshed at that point.”
