Gareth Southgate’s new England can end a decade of qualification apathy on road to Euro 2020

That it took until the 78th minute for the first Mexican wave at Wembley on Friday, and that the paper plane that had landed in the press box 10 minutes earlier turned out to be a lone kamikaze raider, rather than the first wave of the usual aerial bombardment, spoke volumes.

The latter in particular had become a symptom of ‘boring England’.

Prior to Harry Kane’s winner against Croatia in the Nations League last year, two of the loudest cheers heard at Wembley this decade had come first, in 2014, when Peru defender Hansell Riojas was clipped by a plane sent gliding down from the top tier and, second, when one found the net from an impossibly tight angle during the drab win over Slovenia that sealed qualification for the 2018 World Cup.

Things are different now, and not just because the cardboard mosaic tiles that made such ideal building materials have been usurped by handheld fabric flags.

After the 2018 that was - the joys of Russia, and then relief and euphoria in discovering that it wasn’t all a fluke - it’s easy to forget just how dreary the process of qualifying for a major tournament had become.

In the dozen years since the ‘Wally with the Brolly’ debacle, England have lost just one qualifier. That defeat came in dead rubber against Ukraine at the end of qualifying for the 2010 World Cup, in which (in a sign of things to come) Rob Green was the villain, sent off after 13 minutes.

In pictures | England vs Czech Republic | 22/03/2019

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The last four major tournaments have all been reached with unbeaten campaigns that inspired little cause for sustained excitement or optimism, expectations kept low by memories of similarly convincing strolls to finals that bore little or no resemblance to the eventual tournament performance.

Even under Gareth Southgate, who first inherited the side as interim coach midway through their last qualifying campaign, it had simply been a case of getting the job done.

The Wembley crowd sat crafting A4 Spitfires while the team laboured to one-goal wins over Slovakia and Slovenia, and two-goal triumphs over minnows Malta and Lithuania, unaware that the summer of their lives was being plotted behind the scenes.

Only once their place in Russia was booked did Southgate begin to change things - shifting to the back three that would serve them so well - in a series of friendlies against some of the world’s best sides.

Three of England's newest stars celebrate Friday's win Photo: Getty Images
EPA

This time around, it’s a different dynamic, a different England and a different Southgate. The emphasis is on blooding another generation of talent - the second of his relatively brief tenure - made clear on Friday through debuts for Declan Rice and Callum Hudson-Odoi, as well as a first competitive start for Jadon Sancho.

The advent of the Nations League has significantly altered the structure of the international calendar. By the time Southgate comes to pick his squad for the European Championships, England will have had just four post-World Cup friendlies; half as many as they played in the same period between World Cup 2014 and Euro 2016.

One of those was the Wayne Rooney tribute night against the USA, and you would imagine that two of the others, in March 2020, will be used for fine-tuning rather than experimentation. That leaves qualifiers against the likes of Kosovo, Montenegro and Bulgaria as the ideal schooling ground for the new wave.

The expansion of the European Championships, coupled with the Nations League insurance policy, means it is almost harder not to qualify for the 2020 finals. The suspicion is that you could go some way down the England age-group pyramid before you found a team that would not finish in the top two in this group, given Friday’s opponents were supposed to be the second-best side in it.

Still, the fact that these are, on paper at least, competitive games means something. Sancho’s start felt more significant than his one in a rotated team against the USA.

Hudson-Odoi had the honour of becoming the youngest competitive England debutant in history, rather than the sixth sub in a 1-0 friendly defeat to Germany’s B team. Both he and Rice left the field with not only a first cap and dreams realised, but with three points in the bag.

The days when qualifying campaigns could produce moments of legend – 5-1 in Munich, 0-0 in Rome, Beckham against Greece – have probably gone.

But if Friday’s showing is anything to go by, we may remember this as the one where Sancho & Co. arrived on the international stage, and that might just be enough to keep Wembley's aeronautical engineers focused on the football.

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