The Guppy paradox: are England's left-sided woes back to haunt them? | Jonathan Liew
14-Oct-2020 07:00:49 | Guardian
Gareth Southgate has been wrestling with an all too familiar problem for England managers this week, to which Kevin Keegan certainly never found the answer
Steve Guppy is the one everyone remembers. Most dedicated followers of English football in the late 1990s and early 2000s would also be able to name Jason Wilcox and Steve Froggatt. Then you have your David Dunns, your Alan Thompsons, your Chris Powells. Two decades on, the infamous “England left-sided problem” tends to be evoked more as an exercise in nostalgia, a display of performative recall, than as a long-term failure of systems and imagination that Gareth Southgate may just be in danger of repeating.
A “left-sided David Beckham” was Kevin Keegan’s memorable description of Guppy ahead of his England debut, which sadly would also turn out to be his England swansong, against Belgium in 1999. And over the years, as the tournament failures piled up, England’s problem left flank would become a sort of hex, a footballing black hole, a lost cause to which some of our best young men were sacrificed, not all of whom would survive the experience.
Related: Gareth Southgate stumbles upon perfect tactics to take down Belgium | Jonathan Liew
The emergence of Ashley Cole as England’s first genuinely world-class left-sided player since Chris Waddle jolted them into a painstaking evolution
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