“What sort of message does that send to the players who are involved for this weekend’s matches?”
Chris Sutton has called out Gareth Southgate over recent comments made by the England manager. Southgate was asked last week about the chances of Scott Sinclair, the Celtic winger, making the England squad, and dismissed the player completely.
“I had a conversation with Brendan (Rodgers) about him at the end of last season,” Southgate said.
“He’s a good player but we have good quality in that area of the pitch and at the moment I think he is just below the level of what we have already got. And I would be happy to have that conversation (what he needs to do to break through) with him but I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about performance aspects in public.”
Sutton reckons this was an “arrogant” thing to say, as England are not blessed with quality in Sinclair’s position.
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“There’s a World Cup approaching next summer and it’s not as if Southgate has top-quality players cluttered in every corner,” the former Celtic and Blackburn Rovers striker wrote in his column for The Daily Record.
“If I was Sinclair, I’d be most unhappy. It’s a public slap in the face and it was unnecessary. Actually, it was just downright dismissive towards Scotland. If that was an English Premier League player, I’m pretty sure the response would have been along the lines of: ‘I’m aware of him, he’s in my thoughts. It wasn’t to be this time, but if he keeps working hard, we’ll be aware of it’.”
Sinclair was a highly-rated youngster at Chelsea and impressed during two seasons with Swansea City, where he worked with current Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers. A move to Manchester City didn’t work out and Sinclair was relegated from the Premier League with Aston Villa in 2016. He has rebuilt his career with Celtic, scoring 25 goals in his first season with the Scottish champions as they went unbeaten in the league.
Sinclair was named player of the year and recently scored in Celtic’s 3-0 Champions League win over Anderlecht, the club’s second away win in the competition in 28 attempts. He’s a player in form, unlike some of those selected in his position for the England squad.
“Now let’s get one thing straight. I’m not suggesting for a second that Sinclair should be in the England starting line-up,” Sutton wrote.
“He’s not as good as Raheem Sterling and he’s not as good as Marcus Rashford, who both play in the wider areas… But when you scratch underneath, there are places up for grabs and I find it astounding that Sinclair hasn’t even been called into a squad over the past 12 months to be looked at for a week at St George’s Park during training. Jesse Lingard has been selected. He hasn’t even started a game for Manchester United in the Premier League this season. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain has had a torrid start to the season. His confidence is through the floor, yet he’s back in the fold.”
Sutton likens Southgate’s snub of Sinclair to how Sven-Goran Eriksson repeatedly overlooked Alan Thompson, despite the former midfielder excelling in a Celtic team which reached the Uefa Cup final in 2003.
Is Sinclair better than Oxlade-Chamberlain and Lingard? Probably not. But he’s in better form than the pair, and probably doesn’t deserve to be dismissed out of hand because of the club he’s playing for – particularly when he’s scoring goals in the Champions League.
'English football fans have seen this movie before,' writes @RobRedmond10 https://t.co/7feMKLpiHB
— FootballJOE (@FootballJOE) October 5, 2017
International football is slow and a step down in quality from the Champions League and top European leagues. Northern Ireland have to select players from League One and they reached the last-16 of Euro 2016, beating Ukraine on the way. Southgate’s dismissal arguably shows that he values status over form, where a footballer plays rather than how they are playing. How else can he explain Oxlade-Chamberlain’s inclusion?
Tom Cleverly is playing better now for Watford than he was towards the end of his spells with Manchester United and Everton, when he regularly made the England squad, yet he’s not in contention for Southgate’s squad.
Whether you think Sinclair should be in the England squad or not, Sutton is correct to highlight the flawed logic of the England manager.
