England remain on course for next year’s European Championship, but showed signs of weakness in draw with Ukraine
There are just nine months until Euro 2024, now established as the moment of destiny to top all the other previous moments of destiny for the Gareth Southgate years, and so the England manager ruefully conceded that his team has to be more ruthless than they were here.
The first dropped points in five games of qualifying does not put England in any danger of losing that place in Germany next summer – although it does tug on some familiar anxieties. Is this team ready to win games in those moments that define the lives of players and managers? Top of the group and undefeated, this should be but a small pebble in the shoe yet after so many decades of disappointment it can come to feel so much more significant.
Southgate’s team has some of the best players in Europe, on form and on reputation, and yet this was not a performance that quite aligned. They were dominant in possession, and controlled the game for the most part, but they never quite broke the spirit of a Ukraine team playing in a city where thousands of their compatriots live as refugees.
Later, Southgate would draw on the bigger picture as he so often did, of the value of the experience – a hostile crowd, an opponent driven on by something much greater, a point salvaged from a goal behind. That is straight out the Southgate playbook – a shrewd shift of the narrative from glass half-empty to glass half-full. Yet even he had to admit that there were parts of the game that fell below usual standards.