Hang on, roll the tape back. Play it again. Shock as Jack Grealish and Marcus Rashford left out of England squad. England players using £421 smart ring to boost Euros hopes. Fury over Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer comments on podcast. Some men throw beer cups at Gareth Southgate (and miss). Jude Bellingham in hot water over “obscene gesture”. Nineteen-year-old runs England midfield in first international tournament. Bellingham fined over “obscene gesture” but escapes ban. Southgate hits back at critics. Southgate fumes over tactical “leaks” in media.
Did you spot it? Did you need another look? Like the famous viral video of the moonwalking bear, there are times when it’s easy to get lost in the noise, in the distractions, to follow the loose threads, and ignore something quite unusual happening right in your field of vision. Like Kobbie Mainoo, who in the time it took you to read this paragraph has already played three passes and slipped down the defender’s blind side to make himself available for the return.
Statistics will tell you only part of the story, but they will at least tell you a part. As we approach the final stages of this tournament, Mainoo’s pass completion rate of 94.4% is the sixth highest. Ahead of him: Sasa Lukic of Serbia, Orel Mangala of Belgium and three defenders. Behind him: Rodri (93.2%), Aurélien Tchouaméni (93%), Jorginho (91.2%), Granit Xhaka (90.7%), Toni Kroos (90.4%) and Luka Modric (86%).
Bear in mind, too, that these are not stat-padded passes, easy reset balls played under minimal pressure. The numbers – and the eyes – testify that Mainoo has frequently been operating in the most crowded area of the pitch, where the margins are at their finest and space at a premium. Against Switzerland the defining motif of his evening was of receiving the ball within a triangle of red shirts, surrounded by much bigger men, brushing them off and holding his own. More than half his touches have come in the middle third, and 38% in the attacking third.
At which point, it is worth setting this into some context. Quietly, and in the space of two games, England have basically solved the midfield problem that has been preoccupying successive England managers since … Sven-Göran Eriksson? Bobby Robson? Walter Winterbottom? Campaign after campaign has been hobbled by English football’s chronic inability to produce the midfielder who can simply and productively take the ball, keep possession, offer control in midfield. “We have been short of these types of players for seven or eight years, if I’m honest,” Southgate lamented before the tournament. “At times, that has had an effect on the way we have been able to play.”
Well, here he is. He remains, lest we forget, 19 years of age. Perhaps there are similarities here with his instant impact on Erik ten Hag’s listing Manchester United team this season: a dysfunctional collective for whom the centre of midfield is not simply a weakness but a kind of scourge, the source of their most vivid fears. To come in and somehow inject not just calmness but hope, not just to recycle play but to advance it, not just to have the ball but to want it and to enjoy it: yes, this is new, even revolutionary, and perhaps the secret to its success (so far) has been trying not to make too big a fuss out of it.
Because unless you’re watching particularly closely, it’s not immediately obvious what Mainoo has been doing out there. He hasn’t scored or assisted. He doesn’t have lung-busting pace or an urge to unveil his entire box of tricks. Indeed, the very lack of ostentation is the point. For decades English football has possessed central midfielders who see their role as a canvas, never content with one touch where three touches will do, dissatisfied with their possession unless they have done something eye-catching. Desperate, above all, to be seen.
Mainoo, by contrast, wants to disappear. There are of course flourishes there: a wicked long shot, the deadly spin and run that took two Swiss players out of the game on Saturday night, allowing him to stride 45 yards up the middle of the pitch. But most of his game is about combination play. Bringing others into the game. Drawing defenders towards him and making space elsewhere.
Everything here happens at close quarters, the ball sequestered amid those quick, clever feet, never content with the easy backward pass or the low-percentage long diagonal. In 210 minutes of football he has played only five long balls, taken more touches in the attacking third (per 90 minutes) than either Bellingham or Harry Kane. Against Switzerland, his midfield partner Declan Rice made 25 passes to Jordan Pickford or the two centre-halves: essentially resetting play. Mainoo played three, and one of them was the kick-off.
In a way, this is probably the last major tournament in which Mainoo will be able to play in relative anonymity. English football’s culture of anointing overnight saviours, overloading them until they slip up, will surely come for him too. He doesn’t have a messianic nickname, doesn’t have his own song, doesn’t have his own mural or fragrance deal. The temptation from here will be to put his name in lights, to make him the star, to “build the team around him”, whatever that means.
Maybe this is what he wants. But it’s hard to argue that this is what he needs. Before the tournament he did an interview with the style magazine Dazed and Confused, where he explained – with trademark simplicity – his approach to the game in his early years.
“I thought it was fun,” he said, “and I still do.” In a context where everything tends towards the grand, the operatic, the melodramatic, the splenetic, Mainoo’s very emergence feels like its own small act of progress.