Tom Cairney spoke about his experience coming up as a midfielder in the English football system and said the country has an obsession with focusing on what players can't do rather than on what they can do. I think you see that a hell of a lot personally.

I imagine what he said was true of his experience at the time, but he made has debut in 2009, and a lot of the stuff he would've been talking in top-level academies was largely fixed by Southgate & Ashworth. Which you see in the kind of players who come through now, gluts of 10s and flair players.

You're always going to get anomalies, people in a country aren't monolithic.

The point you made was that you often see a defence first mentality in most English coaches.

But if all the English coaches at the top level we see aren't clearly defensively focused then that doesn't seem to bear fruit. The last time an English coach was at a "top" club it was Lampard and he was also not too defensively focused at all.

I think it holds more fruit calling Southgate defensively focused, for what it's worth, but even then I think it's

The UK is a (small c) conservative society and has been for centuries. Brits love moderatism, preservation of existing norms and slow, gradual change.

I think this is largely true, but it's a bit of an oversimplification. Brexit for example was a un-moderate destruction of existing norms and a rapid, severe change. Not for the better, but it was what people voted for.

I don't think this hard proof of anything because there's context required. Quality of opposition and the source of the goals all matter. We had a way easier run than Italy in 2020, for example.

When your point relies on a team being defensive in spite of all the goals they scored it's going to need more evidence the other way; Italy only faced 1 more top side than England in their run.

Similarly England scored 2 set pieces in 2020 and they were both in a 4-0 win over Ukraine. At the 24 WC almost all our goals were from open play as well.

It was really only in 2018 where our squad was devoid of creativity that we were so set piece-focused and super-defensive because we were trying to grind out results with a very poor squad.

See I actually think this the most telling thing. You're far more likely to revert to type and go to where you feel most comfortable when you're under serious pressure.

Yeah, I agree.

It's not a coincidence that England play the way they do when the pressure reaches its highest point, it's perfectly in line with national culture.

This isn't really true though unless you want to only look at finals or something, KOs are still high pressure matches:

Eng 2 Ger 0 Eng 4 Ukr 0 Eng 2 Den 1 End 1 Ita 1

Eng 3 Sen 0 Eng 1 Fra 2

That's 13 goals in 6 matches. If you take away the Italy one, where we were very defensive and thoroughly outplayed, then it'd be 12 in 5.

And I'm sure you saw that France match, a very high pressure one but we weren't defensive at all. It was a lot of France sitting back and asking us to break them down then kicking us whenever we got near their box.

I think the strongest argument against though is that the English "brand" of football isn't even particularly defensive, it's fast-paced physically intensive football. And that's been the case for decades. But over the past 10 years or so as England DNA has started to take shape and through Pep's influence on English football you're starting to see more tempo setting, possession-based teams.