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Roy Hodgson must get more from Jack Wilshere and his midfield muddle

This may be a poor England team but it is also a poor England team with a valuable point. These may be the two salient facts to emerge from the retreat from Kyiv but they should not be allowed to still completely any further debate. In the aftermath of England’s dreary, error-strewn, unarguably useful 0-0 draw, Roy Hodgson seemed intent on finishing what his players had started, emerging in tightly stitched, backs-to-the-wall mode to make a commendably stubborn attempt to smother any debate on the wider merits of his team’s performance. This seems to be pretty much the way forward now.

At some point, though, it becomes necessary to peer behind the veil a little. For all the obfuscation, the mitigating cries of systemic decline and a terrifying tide of overseas immigration, this is by no means a team without talent. Specifically, England’s midfield is a cause for concern: on paper their strongest asset but in practice an enduring fulcrum of failure through successive managers, and perhaps the most distressing aspect of Tuesday night’s muddle. One moment stood out in the second half. Not for the first time the agreeably ferrety Yevhen Konoplyanka showed excellent control near the halfway line, taking a shin-high pass in his stride with a neat little jump and turning to unleash some fresh form of jinking torture in the direction of Kyle Walker. Seconds later Jack Wilshere attempted a similar piece of control, attempting to take a hurried pass in a tight space but losing control of the ball and finding himself swallowed up by yellow shirts. Wilshere, England’s most alluringly soft-shoed midfielder, had that kind of game, looking spooked and frantic and sparking subsequently a slightly overheated social media debate about his basic merits as a footballer.

There are two things worth saying about this. First Wilshere simply had a terrible game, completing only 12 passes, making no tackles, providing no assists for an attempt at goal and losing the ball nine times (by contrast Konoplyanka made 26 accurate passes and provided four attempt-assists). Second, and more importantly, he remains a genuine asset that Hodgson must learn to exploit. The precise extent of his talents will naturally be a matter for interminable debate. Clearly with Wilshere there is the historic problem of unrealistic expectation. He is an excellent ball-playing midfielder – and yet because in England he goes against type, his value inflated by his scarcity, the temptation in his early years has been to hoist Wilshere aloft on a makeshift litter of confused expectation. It is also fair to say he was not best used by his manager against Ukraine, positioned as the most advanced midfielder in a rigid five and asked to play as a kind of scrabbling, fire-fighting No10 in an area where England possession always tends to be stretched and frantic. Played deeper, facing the opposition head on, he might have been able to assert his own passing rhythms a little better.

Beyond this England’s midfield was a terrible mess generally in the Olympic Stadium – and surely more of a mess than it needed to be. This was a five-man affair made up of experienced Champions League-level midfielders – selected and drilled by Hodgson – that, despite its rigidly linear lines, still somehow managed to resemble a frieze of the raft of the Medusa, not so much a fluid, modern ball-playing midfield as a series of gristly and muscular obstacles. Hodgson’s immediate explanation for England’s failure to muster more than a single shot on goal centred on the absence of three strikers but Rickie Lambert, who had a better game than Wayne Rooney in the same stadium 14 months ago, is not the problem here. It is in that midfield, the most important part of any aspirant top level football team, that the real fault-lines were exposed. It is here that the tempo and texture of a match is decided and it was here that England looked like a team with no real idea how they planned to move the ball among themselves, lacking not just coherent attacking patterns but any rhythm or purpose in possession.

It is hard to imagine more could not be drawn from an area in which even this pre-excused England are relatively well-staffed. Post-match discussion has tended to circle around how Michael Carrick, a more disciplined sitting midfielder, might have improved England’s retention of the ball. And yet this is something of a chimera. Carrick can hardly be presented as the final piece in England’s midfield jigsaw when in reality there is no jigsaw to speak of. Without coherent, intelligent movement around him his impact will necessarily be limited. Even the world’s greatest passer of a ball would struggle to pull strings when there are in fact no strings, just a a load of frayed and dangling threads.

Is any of this Hodgson’s fault? Consider for example the performance of James Milner in Kyiv, which involved little more than trundling remorselessly in a straight furrow from horizon to horizon, like some indomitable soviet tractor. Contrast this with Ukraine’s Andriy Yarmolenko, who flitted inside, found space and repeatedly changed his angle of attack. And yet Milner often plays with far more fluidity for Manchester City, where at times he will drop deep, switch flanks and even, under Roberto Mancini, pop up in the centre-forward position. Milner may be a limited player in some senses but, like Wilshere, he is also playing under orders.

A point, of course, keeps qualification in England’s hands. And yet it should not end any kind of debate over their performance. Should England reach Brazil and – hmmm, let’s see – come unstuck against their first classy opposition, there will be the same old sense of ambient bafflement when it turns out they have failed to develop a strategy that might take them past better teams. These are the matches in which that armature is laid down. It is Hodgson’s task now to squeeze a little more from England’s talented fudge of a midfield before their last two Group H qualifiers at Wembley, where penetration rather than simply obstruction will be required. Never mind the excuses, or the wider structural mitigation. It can surely be done.