Super-subs are back and Jack Grealish can set benchmark as a game-breaker

It is, of course, essential that we draw the positives. In the modern age that is all you can ever do after defeat, look for learnings to be enacted moving forward. Although it almost seems distasteful to point out something that went right for England after a dismal Nations League campaign that culminated in their worst home defeat since 1928, there was, in the fatigue and the frustration, one vague sliver of a silver lining. It’s not just that Jack Grealish dragged England back into the game away to Germany, it’s that his performance in Munich hinted at a new way of conceptualising the game.

Grealish is one of those players who, for 18 months or so, has come with a clamour. There is a constituency within the England support and punditocracy that demands his inclusion. He is a smart, bright player who seems somehow normal; if he didn’t happen to be a supremely gifted footballer, he would be watching matches and necking Jägerbombs in a beer garden. He has an unaffected niceness that makes it almost impossible not to warm to him. But can you trust him to track his man, to close down the passing lanes, not to lose the ball with one gauche trick too many?

It is an issue with which Gareth Southgate and Pep Guardiola have had to wrestle. Grealish, in an unusually revealing on-pitch interview after the final game of the league season, spoke of how hard he has found it to learn a new style at Manchester City. Southgate has talked of the importance of allowing him his freedom. But short of a return to the football of 40 years ago, when complex systems were less prevalent and the team could be built around one playmaking genius, how can that be achieved?

The answer was there in Munich: by bringing him off the bench. Context is