Southgate 'must see what squad players can do' in Nations League

Every good football team must keep moving forwards and England's challenge now is to transform from a side almost good enough to win a European Championship on home soil to one who can lift a World Cup. The two things are very different.

Gareth Southgate has five games to pull this off. Having not started particularly well as an under-strength team lost in Hungary on Saturday, Tuesday's meeting against Germany in the Allianz Arena should tell us much more.

Southgate is in a rare position for an England manager ahead of a World Cup. More often than not, they have been trying to change a mood and reverse a backward momentum following a disappointing Euros. Southgate faced that issue on taking the job in 2016.

This time, it is all about building on relative success and how Southgate chooses to set about it will be interesting. Asked at the team hotel on the outskirts of Munich on Monday if he intended to stay loyal to the core group of players who lost last summer's final to Italy on penalties at Wembley, he said: 'Without a doubt we always want to try to get some continuity. We would like to do that but we would at this time of year break the players in the end.

'We've got clarity. It's not that we are not very clear on what our best team would be. We know if we are playing a World Cup tomorrow what team we would be picking.

'But I think we have also got to find out about people like Jude Bellingham at this sort of time. Give him experiences because we could get to the finals and find that we have got key players missing. So we need that balance.'

It could be argued that in the past the English pendulum has been allowed to swing too far the other way. Too often England have reached the door of a tournament with too many