Bellingham is new England talisman but Southgate fears saviour syndrome

Gareth Southgate knows that relying solely on one gifted player would be repeating an old England mistake

The big man is back or at least he is coming back. It is a situation we have lived before with England on the eve of a major tournament in Germany. For Wayne Rooney post-metatarsal at the 2006 World Cup, see Jude Bellingham, for different reasons, and Euro 2024.

It has been a draining week for Gareth Southgate, the dark clouds gathering as the manager prepared to make the final cuts to his squad, the anxiety unavoidable. It is football. But it is also people. The difficult decisions, especially the ones to omit Harry Maguire, Jack Grealish and James Maddison, the first of the trio for fitness reasons, were felt by everyone. Continue reading...

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Wiegman’s Lionesses rekindle lost energy to fire spectacular comeback | Jonathan Liew

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Nations League victory against the Dutch arrives at the last despite a lack of clarity and brittleness creeping into the team They’ll always have Paris. Throughout this Nations League campaign this has been an England team fighting its own sense of entropy, still giving everything, still trying the same plans and processes in the hope that eventually something would click. And at 9.34pm on a briskly cold Wembley night, it finally did. Ella Toone’s injury-time goal earned England three points and kept their faintly glowing Olympic dream alive. But somehow it also did so much more. It breathed life into a team and a cycle, and a moment that for so much of the evening had felt like it was drawing to its natural conclusion provided a rousing encore to a cast preparing for its final curtain. There will be new challenges and new frontiers to conquer soon enough, a fresh set of European Championship qualifiers in the spring, but for now this iteration of the Lionesses still has tricks up ...
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Khiara Keating the hero as Manchester City knock Arsenal out of FA Cup

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There was redemption at Meadow Park for the goalkeeper Khiara Keating as Manchester City won 1-0 and knocked the 14-time FA Cup winners Arsenal out of the competition in the fifth round. Keating weathered a late Arsenal charge, including pulling off a stunning save from a header destined for the top corner in added time, pushing over Lotte Wubben-Moy’s effort and clawing away a shot that looked to have crossed the line to atone for her errors for both goals in City’s 2-1 defeat here in the league that left her in tears. Continue reading...
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