Gareth Southgate feels England are too tired to press – is he right?

Amid all the downbeat assessments of England’s lethargic performance against Denmark on Thursday, the most alarming of all was possibly offered by Gareth Southgate himself.

“We know with the profile of the players we’ve got, we don’t feel the way to press is really high up the pitch,” he said. “We don’t think that’s the physical level of the team at the moment.”

He was not alone in believing that England seemed tired in Frankfurt. Alan Shearer, the former England international, said the team looked “absolutely shattered”, while ex-Arsenal defender Per Mertesacker used similar language on German television.

It is a damning indictment given England are only two games into a tournament that could – if they fulfil their pre-tournament ambitions of winning in next month’s Berlin final – see them play another five matches. It is hardly a ringing endorsement of England ending their 58-year trophy drought.

Yet there is no denying the evidence of our own eyes. Harry Kane was hauled off with 20 minutes remaining against Denmark, while Declan Rice and Jude Bellingham looked worryingly off the pace. When the full-time whistle blew on Thursday, John Stones and Kieran Trippier immediately sprawled on their backs: while exasperation at the result may have played a part in their reaction, so too could exhaustion.

Rice has clocked up more distance (22.8km) than any other England player in the opening two games, with Newcastle United’s Trippier, playing out of position at left-back, hitting 21.9km. The below graphic shows the other players’ distances.

But are England really too tired?

According to Opta, before arriving in Germany earlier this month, the 26-man squad had already played a combined 82,143 minutes in club games in the 2023-24 season.

That sounds a lot – and it is – but it is by no means the biggest workload among the Euro 2024 favourites. In fact, it is less than Germany (85,475 minutes) and Portugal (82,345), although higher than France and Spain.

Given Germany are flying at the competition so far, winning their opening two games in impressive style, and Portugal have also started their campaign positively, are they disproving the notion that England’s players are too tired?

Delving deeper, there is the issue of which players have the most minutes in their legs. The two players with the greatest workload in 2023-24 are Aston Villa defender Ezri Konsa (4,370 minutes) and his team-mate Ollie Watkins (4,318) – yet neither have featured greatly for England in Germany.

The likes of Rice, Kane, Foden and Saka all featuring in the top eight for minutes played in 2023-24 is probably more relevant in analysing its possible effect on England’s performances, particularly when it comes to executing a press.

“Our press wasn’t intense enough,” Southgate said after the Denmark match. “It meant our backline had a problem with the players dropping either side of our pivots. So, that’s something that has to be better.”

Here is a perfect example. Left-winger Foden and midfielder Rice jump onto Denmark’s central midfielder. Kane is late to press centre-back Jannik Vestergaard, who has the time to pass through England’s midfield. Trippier is pinned by right wing-back Joakim Maehle, which leaves Jonas Wind free to receive in an advanced position.

It was one of multiple first-half examples in the Denmark game of England looking uncoordinated in their pressing, failing to jump as a collective. Southgate bemoaned the fact the opposition played back-threes/fives in their first two games (Denmark and Serbia), but those are the first-choice systems of those teams, so they knew what to expect.

There are mitigating circumstances for some of England’s players. There is a question over whether Kane, 30, can be at full fitness given he was substituted during Bayern Munich’s Champions League semi-final second-leg defeat at Real Madrid on May 8 and then missed his side’s final game of the season with a back injury.

Bellingham, meanwhile, has not only played a lot of minutes for Real Madrid (3,642) but has done so in high-octane, high-pressure matches, helping the club win La Liga and the Champions League in his first season in Spain. He, too, missed several games through a shoulder injury and ankle sprain, as well as two for being suspended due to a red card.

England have multiple performance and nutrition staff with them in Germany to maximise the players’ fitness and recovery.

This includes two physical performance coaches: Chris Jones, who started working with England in October 2023, and Hailu Theodros. They have also been joined by James Redden, who joined the Football Association in 2022 and predominantly carries out the role for the under-21s.

Mike Naylor, a consultant nutritionist who works as head of performance nutrition at the English Institute of Sport, is also in Germany, along with lead performance chef Tom Kenton and his deputy, David Pyle.

England train as a group for around two hours a day, generally between 11am and 1pm, before players do individual gym work. Yet tiredness is not only a physical ailment but a mental one.

Southgate has not brought a sports psychologist with the squad to Germany. Dr Ian Mitchell — who helped England reach the final at the last European Championship — was released in March 2023 following a review of the tournament cycle.

Dan Abrahams, an experienced sports psychologist, has explained to The Athletic – in general terms as opposed to commenting specifically on the England team – what impact fatigue can have on a player’s performance.

“Having worked with players and teams over the years in pressured situations, the volume of anxiety is going to be turned up and the volume of stress is going to be turned up,” Abrahams said.

“There is a chance to experience a great deal of performance anxiety, and the way that somatic anxiety works is when you are experiencing what may be construed as unhelpful emotion and negative emotion, that negative emotion is going to make a difference to how energised you feel, to how ready you feel, to how alert you feel. All of this comes under the broad banner of activation.

“As a footballer, your job is to help yourself get activated, to be ready, alert and energised. What stress does, and what performance anxiety does, is it can work in complex ways.

“It can overly activate you early on, so subsequently you deplete your stores of adrenaline and come to the game fatigued because your energy stores have been depleted.”

Abrahams also points out how it is not just matchday that can make a player tired. He believes it is incumbent on the coaching staff to create a schedule that prevents fatigue, while also being powerless to stop the “imagined experience”.

“Players have their own individual narratives,” Abrahams added. “If a player is going into the dressing room and telling everyone they are favourites and have to win, then a big part of that becomes exhausting because you only have so much energy in your brain, which is beholden to the sugars and glucose in our brain.

“When you train, you deplete your stores of sugar, glucose and adrenaline. When you think about the game, you also deplete your stores of sugar and glucose.

“If players are constantly thinking about it and putting themselves under pressure, a strong hypothesis could be they are mentally exhausting themselves and physically exhausting themselves.

“This will have an impact on their ability to execute a game plan from a tactical perspective, but also execute individually from an awareness and decision-making perspective. When you add all those things together, that can be what you witness on the pitch; an exhausted performance, slow and sluggish, second to the ball, slow to cover and get into space.”

The reality for England is that they should have enough quality to overcome Slovenia and finish top of Group C. They also started slowly in Euro 2021 and went on to reach the final, so all is not lost — but the warning signs in Frankfurt are difficult to ignore.

Rice was keen to downplay suggestions England were suffering unduly.

“Lads are never going to admit if they’re tired or not,” he said. “It’s tournament football. I watched France the other night, Portugal changed to a back five – they’re not going out and pressing full throttle. It’s about getting that balance of when we can press and when we can not because, the further it goes on, we’re going to play against better opposition, more world-class players.

“If you don’t get your press right, which probably is the most important thing on the pitch, you’re going to get picked off.”

The fact is that Germany, whose squad played more minutes than any other nation in club football last season, have, so far, been the best team at Euro 2024.

The danger for England is that by the time they play them – or any of the tournament favourites – they do not currently seem to have the energy to match them.

(Top photo: Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)