‘It has not been easy’: England’s Under-20s size up hectic World Cup

O n a wet and windy night in Manchester, Ian Foster runs through an itinerary that is taking the head coach of England Under-20s men’s team to Marbella and Bali over the next week. “It’s tough at the top,” he jokes. Warmer weather aside, Foster’s quip has substance, as the ripple effects of staging a winter World Cup in Qatar continue to be felt in international circles.

England commenced preparations for the Under-20s World Cup in Indonesia with a 2-0 win over Germany at Manchester City’s Academy Stadium on Wednesday. Samuel Iling-Junior, the former Chelsea academy graduate who has broken into Juventus’s first team this season, scored twice as England overcame a difficult start to deliver a controlled and comfortable victory. The squad now heads for the Marbella Football Centre where they face USA on Saturday and France on Tuesday. And that will be that in terms of a World Cup warmup: three fixtures in seven days. Foster then heads from southern Spain to Bali for next Friday’s World Cup draw.

Wednesday was the team’s first competitive outing for six months. It was the first, and only, appearance on home soil this season for a squad that qualified for the World Cup by winning the European Under-19s championships last summer. “We were desperate to play in England as European champions,” says Foster, who oversaw the triumph in Slovakia and has stayed in charge of the group’s development. “It is our only opportunity to do so and I thought the crowd [of 2,205] was brilliant. We chose Germany for two reasons: one, it is a special fixture, and, secondly, because of the Elite League they are in. Their players are a year older than ours so we knew it would be a sterner test.”

World Cup preparations would normally be stepping