England's defensive problems go deeper than Carter – and must be fixed fast

The Guardian

2 hours ago

Jess Carter glumly accepted her warm-down top, the pallid commiserations of Arjan Veurink and a seat on the England bench. In truth she had been fortunate to see 70 minutes of this quarter-final, and for all the nightmarish apparitions of the first half perhaps the last few minutes were the loneliest of all. Marooned at the back, 30 yards behind the rest of the team while England forced set pieces and pushed for a route back into the game: a last line of defence that had proved to be very little defence at all.
Esme Morgan would replace her to add some extra heft and the entire system would need to be rejigged to a back three. Carter would watch the excruciating last hour from a seated position, reflecting bleakly on the sort of performance that scars international careers, perhaps even defines them. 'You're feeling nothing and everything at the same time,' she said afterwards. 'It's a turbulent experience. I feel like it's the first time I've smiled since the game.'
The first thing to be said is that it wasn't entirely Carter's fault. England's anomie in the first hour was above all a collective failing, a mass panic that seemed to infect the entire team like a bad illness. Keira Walsh also gave the ball away for Sweden's first goal, Alex Greenwood was bypassed too easily for the second, and Hannah Hampton was having an exceptionally fraught game before spectacularly redeeming herself later.
Acute problems at the back are often the symptom of more chronic issues further up the pitch. And England's sketchy press, their utter inability to gain a foothold in midfield and their unfortunate habit of colliding with the referee presented Sweden with a sitting target on their favoured right flank. Even so, right from the opening minute England's defence gave the impression that they might be in for a long night.
Carter's first act on the ball was to receive a rushed pass from Leah Williamson and punt it straight out of play while trying to funnel it on to Greenwood. Her second act was to give the ball away on the edge of her area. Her third was to pluck the ball defiantly out of the net and punt it back towards the centre circle while her shellshocked teammates surveyed the wreckage around her.
In a way, this encapsulated the confusion that seemed to overcome England after their early setback: the complete absence of a unifying strategy for getting back into the game, 11 players in 11 entirely separate headspaces. Do you try and weather the storm, string a few passes together for confidence, sit a little deeper to squeeze the spaces in behind? Or do you get stuck in, recommit to the original gameplan, try to pile the pressure back on Sweden.
Everyone seemed to have a different answer to this question. While Georgia Stanway and Lauren James went hunting for the ball, and Lucy Bronze went roaming up the right to try and stretch the play, Greenwood dropped a few yards for security and Walsh retreated to the comfort of the back line. The result was space opening up all over the pitch, severed connections and massive underloads that again left Carter isolated against the marauding Stina Blackstenius for the second goal.
And whether in the centre or at left-back, Carter is always a defender who has thrived on those connections, who needs clarity and support, and whose game – based on poise and superior reading rather than pace, height or brute strength – seems to suffer disproportionately when those elements are missing.
When she arrived at Gotham FC last summer she started working with their coach Juan Carlos Amorós, who told her that she would need to rewire her defensive mindset completely. 'You've shown what you can do on the ball, but you don't do it consistently enough,' he said. What he wanted, in essence, was for Carter to start concentrating on the process instead of worrying about outcomes.
'My weakness has always been my technical ability, my consistency in that,' Carter told Sam Mewis on the Women's Game Podcast in May. 'And now I've never been so out of my comfort zone, playing for a team where you always have to play forward, be brave. He [Amorós] would rather me lose the ball 10 times trying to play forward, trying to create something, than just going back to the keeper or going long.' For Carter, reared on the tough love of Emma Hayes at Chelsea, this was the polar opposite of what she had always been taught.
'At Chelsea we were a very direct team – successful with it, but we weren't a possession team at all,' she told Mewis. 'Coaches have told me they want me to be better on the ball. But when we played direct it kind of went out the window a little bit, so … I didn't need to be that good.' But the mindset of playing centre-half for England in a tournament knockout is of an entirely different order to an evening runout at Utah Royals in 35C heat. Here it really does matter if you lose the ball 10 times in a row trying to play forward. Here the outcome matters infinitely more than the process. And perhaps Carter's skittish inconsistency suggests a player trapped between two contradictory instincts, while also being switched between two very different positions.
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Few would be surprised if Sarina Wiegman now gave Carter the opportunity to work through these issues away from the starting XI. Given the way Blackstenius and Delphine Cascarino got the better of Carter, Cristiana Girelli and Sofia Cantore would certainly relish a chance to run at her in Tuesday's semi-final. Morgan and Niamh Charles impressed when they were introduced from the bench, and the smart money is on at least one of them coming in for the Italy game.
The potential ankle injury to Williamson complicates matters, particularly while Wiegman bafflingly continues to see Maya Le Tissier as little more than a training mannequin. If Williamson cannot start, then Wiegman may opt for the safety of a back three with Charles on the left, Morgan and Greenwood in the centre and a reprieved Carter given one more chance alongside them in her preferred system.
Recently Rachel Daly was reminiscing about the Euro 2022 quarter-final win over Spain, a game she described as 'the worst of her life'. Given a torrid evening at left-back, put on her backside by Athenea del Castillo, at breakfast the next morning Daly was still reeling from the experience, questioning everything, wondering whether she was really cut out for the job. Millie Bright's response was curt. 'Let it go,' she said. Daly kept her place, and two games later was a European champion.
Point being: these experiences do not have to define you. Social media, where Carter was being gleefully scapegoated on Friday morning, will always be a place of absolutes and extremes, of gods and demons. But for all her current difficulties, she is a multiple league winner, a continental champion for club and country, a World Cup finalist and above all a far better player than she showed on Thursday night. Whether she gets another chance to prove it, of course, is another matter.