What if the England DNA is just never giving up?

Times

6 days ago

In 2014 the FA introduced a set of principles that aimed to define the core characteristics of the England teams and profile the future players who would people them, calling it the 'England DNA'.
The decade since then has brought the emergence of a new, technically adept cohort of male and female players. More importantly, both the England men's and women's teams have taken a significant step forward in terms of tournament performance, reaching four finals between them — with a fifth to come on Sunday — of which one was unforgettably won by the Lionesses at Wembley in 2022. These are times that England fans feel grateful to be living through.
If you were going to be ultra-critical, though, you'd focus on precisely that idea of England DNA: that shared double-thread which intertwines men's and women's teams and tells us everything we need to know about what an England team looks like, how they play, what their idea of football is.
You could probably count on one hand the number of tournament games, even in this era of unprecedented success, where either team has convincingly demonstrated an identity, a way of playing, with the same force or confidence with which Spain — England's biggest rival as the great dual power of the present era — enact their brand of football.
Tuesday night's game against Italy was a case in point. There were mitigating circumstances for the Lionesses' rather disjointed and reactive performances against France and Sweden. France was their first tournament game without Millie Bright, Mary Earps and Fran Kirby, with new players bedding in, and Sweden pressed England hard and scored in the second minute: it's a pretty hard ask to serenely impose your style of football in those circumstances.
But against Italy, you might have expected more from Sarina Wiegman 's team. They were playing opponents with less quality and far less experience at this level, who for the first half an hour were just trying to feel their way into the occasion. This was exactly the sort of situation where you would expect the superior team, the one playing their fifth straight semi-final, to set the tone and tempo of the match, play their natural game, give a confident exhibition of the way they play.
England offered very little of that. Watching them, I had the familiar feeling of finding it hard to discern what they were actually trying to do, the collective joined-up idea of how they intended to create, control and defend.
The flip side, of course, is that there was so much to admire in the way England came back. This is a team who never know they're beaten. Once again, in adversity, we saw the best of them. For character, mentality and resilience, England's performance could not be faulted, but it's also worth putting a bit of emphasis on their composure and execution.
For the equaliser, Lauren Hemp delivered a superb whipped-in cross to the near post, and Michelle Agyemang finished brilliantly, taking a perfect first touch and then drilling the shot low and hard through the legs of Elena Linari and Laura Giuliani. Given the desperation of the situation, those were moments of exceptional quality.
But to be honest, I'm not sure we expected anything less. These Lionesses have thoroughly earned our confidence in their capacity to keep going until the very last second and more often than not, somehow, just find a way. We've seen them do it many times before, after all. Not only could they easily have lost to Sweden in Zurich, they gritted their way past Nigeria and Colombia at the last World Cup, and scored an 84th-minute equaliser against Spain en route to the trophy in 2022.
To listen to the players after the Italy game, speaking about the confidence they felt that they could do it again, even as the clock ticked past 95 minutes, was to understand that once a team have done this often enough, that belief, that collective memory, compounds so powerfully that it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. 'Whilst there are seconds on the clock,' Leah Williamson said, 'it's less 'if' and more 'how'.'
I don't think it's mere laziness to draw the comparison with the England men's team: the parallels are obvious. At Euro 2024 in particular, Gareth Southgate's team were often dreadfully inert and lacking in ideas when given the blank slate of a goalless scoreboard and an opponent they were expected to beat: think of the match against Slovenia and the start of the matches against Slovakia and Switzerland. They were not good at dictating games. But give them a desperate situation to react to, and the true quality of the team revealed itself.
When Dan Ashworth — then the FA's director of elite development, but now its chief football officer — came up with the England DNA, it was with a vision of formulating a distinct play style in mind. 'As a football nation we have long been characterised by our passion, fighting spirit and effort,' he said. 'Although there are aspects of these characteristics we wish to retain, we do not wish to be solely defined by them.'
Bronze, right, and Mead recover in the cryotherapy chamber after a second consecutive game that went to extra time…
LIONESSES
But where Ashworth had hoped a higher English style would articulate itself, there remains a kind of blank space, one the Lionesses players at this tournament have filled with their evocation of 'proper England': meaning, pretty much, playing with passion, fighting spirit and effort.
And yet, there are a few common things which run through the recent exploits of the two national teams. If you had to sum them up, you would probably say: winning duels. Maximising set pieces. Working until the absolute last second and leaving nothing out on the pitch. And pinning the performance on the skill, swagger and determination of individuals rather than an orchestrated tactical masterplan.
The question is: is this enough? Does all this constitute an identity in its own right, or is it a poor substitute for one, a scant, bare-minimum ethos which exists in the vacuum where England's answer to Spain's possession-based, positional style ought to be?
It's easy to lean towards the latter — and it will be especially so if Sunday brings the spectacle of Spain beating England in a major final for a third year in a row. But when I spoke to the Euro '96 champion Marco Bode last year about Germany's golden era from the 1970s to the mid-Nineties, he advanced the view that the success of those Germany teams was built on work rate, solid temperament and above all, the ability to respond to difficult moments and solve problems. It strikes me that those aren't so different from the virtues which define the England teams now.
The reality is there is no English equivalent of Italy's catenaccio, Germany's gegenpressing, Spain's juego de posición, the Cruyff school of the Netherlands. The attempt to define and invent one was nobly intentioned and may bear fruit one day, but right now still feels like a work in progress. And if there's one cardinal lesson which international football teaches us, it's that you can't wish into existence what you don't have; you can only make the best of what you do.
England v Spain