Rico Lewis joins to offer new perspective on old left-back problem | Nations League

New vibes. New toys. New roles and maybe even new rules. And yes, the more familiar image of Harry Kane banging in a couple of goals and heading for the corner flag in that slightly heavy jog of his: less a man who has just scored for his country and more a man who has just secured a pretty good parking space.

But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this routine victory, secured against routine opposition, was how mysteriously non-routine it felt at times: the same team, but somehow lit, shot from different angles. It’s probably too early to tell whether this is the Lee Carsley effect. But it certainly feels like the No Gareth effect.

Of course, new tournament cycles always bring a certain sense of renewal: the natural waste of players retiring and retiring, the licence and the blank canvas. But England’s first home game in eight years without Gareth Southgate in the dugout was still a lively culture shock. A new combination on the left. Jack Grealish at No. 10. A 24-year-old from Lille in midfield. Noni Madueke as a late substitute. It turns out that there was another future possible all along, one that didn’t need Kieran Trippier at left-back.

We’re not going to rehash the entire Gareth era. You don’t need that kind of dullness in your life. But these two games have already exposed the heartbreaking banality of this whole handbrake on/handbrake off discourse, a dialectic that has effectively haunted Southgate for the last three years of his reign until it finally drove him mad. The choice here was never between simple attack or simple defence, but between new and old angles. Between a new pair of eyes and the same eyes.

So instead of shuffling Trent Alexander-Arnold in and out of roles, you give him the chance to take over at right-back and reward him with his best performance in an England shirt. You give Anthony Gordon the keys to the left wing. You give Angel Gomes a chance. Not all of this is guaranteed to work, or will work. But at this stage of the cycle, ambition is king.

The real revelation was at left-back, although that’s a laughably inadequate way to describe what Rico Lewis does. Like all the best Pep Guardiola products, Lewis could honestly be a central midfielder or an inside forward or a false 9 or a pitch invader. What matters is that this is a player who could hardly be less in tune with the pedigree of his position, with the Kenny Sansoms and Ashley Coles and Chris Powells and Steve Guppys who came before him.

The first indication that Lewis would not be your average left-back came early on when he took the ball with his back to goal in an advanced area and, as he laid the ball off to Declan Rice, indicated where he thought the 60-cap international veteran should play the ball next. Lewis is still 19, but already seems to see the game in the abstract, and to have a manager’s sixth sense for where the spaces might open up.

There was a lovely one-two with Grealish and a run that saw him make two challenges and a deft combination with Eberechi Eze in the closing stages. But essentially this is a player who simply plugs in: who makes sense of tight spaces, who offers a different wavelength, a different tempo. Watch him for 90 minutes and it’s remarkable how much of the game he spends walking.

It was actually Southgate who handed Lewis his debut against North Macedonia last November. But for all his many renegade qualities, this is a position Southgate has largely viewed in canonical, literal terms: the defender playing on the left. So it’s Luke Shaw or Ben Chilwell, and if you can’t choose, a right-back like Trippier or Ashley Young. Lewis lasted one game, gave away a penalty and was promptly demoted to the under-21s.

But elite football – particularly at club level – has revived the role of the full-back. They are no longer faithfully stuck to the touchline. They are no longer understood primarily in terms of their defensive function. Lewis wants to develop into a central midfielder one day, and let’s be honest, that’s probably what he wants. should want. The reality is that in the ultra-fluid modern game, it probably doesn’t matter.

Maybe Lewis will make this position his own. Maybe not. Maybe Carsley will get the permanent job and maybe not. But it is a measure of England’s evolution that four games ago England’s left-back was Trippier, and now he is a teenage prodigy who can literally be anything he wants. No solutions and no answers yet. But it is a new perspective on an old problem, and for now, perhaps that is enough.