England faced a miniature crisis of their own making after an assistant coach accidentally leaked what appeared to be the lineup for their second World Cup group game against Panama.
On Thursday, assistant manager Steve Holland was photographed during training holding a clearly viewable piece of paper that appeared to list the starting 11 that the team planned to use against Panama. The situation caused something of an uproar in England and a debate on whether or not the media should have done more to protect the national team’s secrets, but manager Gareth Southgate downplayed the situation on Friday.
“It doesn’t bother me in the slightest,” Southgate said, via Matt Law of the Telegraph. “There’s a squad of 23 names on the sheet, the next sheet has different players in different positions because we swap people in and swap people out.
“For me, no drama but obviously any time if we were to give the opposition the opportunity of having our team is a disadvantage to us. So of course our media has to decide whether they want to help the team or not. But, given that was just a squad list, it doesn’t make any difference really.”
Right back Kyle Walker said Holland had apologized to the team and as far as he was concerned, the situation was behind them.
“Steve cleared it up this morning in training and he has apologized to us all, which we had a bit of banter with him about and that was it,” Walker said. “We just knocked it on the head at that.
“It was just before training, just before we went out and did our warm up, he gave his apologies and said it was the first time he had messed up in 20 years, which we had a bit of a laugh about because his refereeing skills are not great. It was a bit of banter, we move on and are looking forward to the game now.”
There may be some deflecting going on here, but it probably won’t matter all that much. It hardly makes the week any less rough for England’s coaching staff, though.
