The Warm-Up: England’s fresh start faces familiar foe, Roy Keane manages a smile

After a bold attempt to usher in yet another new era with some straight talking about English underachievement before this friendly, Gareth Southgate’s tactics demonstrated his intent for actions to follow words.

Granted, the 3-4-3 (or its variants) did feel a bit like copying the cool kids of the Premier League but – in theory at least – it feels like a system for which Southgate’s current crop are well stocked. Elite English players don’t grow on trees these days, but there are plenty of tireless wing-backs around to charge up and down the left and right flanks for their country, while any formation that can wrap itself neatly around Dele Alli’s centralised mischief is worth exploring.

It’s worth repeating – because many keep forgetting, understandably – that the result didn’t matter in Dortmund, or in most friendlies. Lukas Podolski’s winner (more on which below) was a tidy conclusion for the evening, but England had carved out enough promising openings to suggest that Southgate’s test-run has potential.

Change for change’s sake isn’t usually the way, but England are long overdue a revamp.

Captain, coach, physio, caretaker manager. Five decades and 44 trophies. If anyone summed up the Boot Room at Anfield, it was Ronnie Moran, who has died at the age of 83.

Moran’s Liverpool peak came as a relentlessly demanding but forward-thinking coach under Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan and Kenny Dalglish – a period of astonishing success at home and in Europe – but his influence extended to the club’s modern legends like Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard.

In an era when players can force a move whenever the mood takes them – and managers exist on borrowed time – the idea of one man spending half a century with one club feels rather exceptional.

There’s no respite from the traditional spring-time Emirates grumblings, even in international week: Arsene Wenger, speaking to beIN Sports, has revealed that contract talks with Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil have been put on hold.

“At the moment we have not got an agreement,” said of Sanchez. “We have decided to focus on the end of the season and talk about it in the summer. It is the same situation with Özil because once you don’t find an agreement and it [the negotiation] lasts, it is not good so it is better you get it out and sit down in the summer.”

Such uncertainty is likely to feed the disquiet that continues to surround Wenger’s own future at the club. On that subject, he remains oddly elusive: “My news is that I have no news.”

The summer is going to bring some answers to the repeated questions, and they won’t all be pleasant ones.

Past Roy Keane press conferences have taught us all a few things: 1) Roy Keane doesn’t like stupid questions, 2) Roy Keane doesn’t like it when your phone rings, and 3) Roy Keane does not do banter.

Cue two young intrepid reporters, ahead of Ireland’s World Cup qualifier against Wales, with one line of questioning that Keane might not have expected.

He’s smiling! Watch his eyes light up as someone finally works their charm on him! Hope they turned their phones off.

If there is a more satisfying way to bow out of international football than to spank one into the top corner against one of your most noted rivals and then leave the pitch to the sound of some peak Hans Zimmer, then it is yet to be invented.

Germany, you may not be surprised to learn, have never been short of a goalscorer or two. Podolski’s rather narrow skill-set of left-foot belters has been sufficient, though, to propel him to more international goals than Rudi Voller, Jurgen Klinsmann, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Uwe Seeler and Oliver Bierhoff. Only Gerd Muller and Miroslav Klose have more for Die Mannschaft.

Kick-off in Dortmund was delayed by seven minutes for the Podolski party to get started and – despite cutting a peripheral figure for most of the game – the Galatasaray man obliged the occasion with a rocket beyond a helpless Joe Hart. Even as they are ushered out the door, German footballers still deliver.

You could make an attempt at mitigation: the songs have just become contextless habit, England’s football team haven’t given their fans much to sing about anyway, and club rivalries have pushed the Three Lions to the periphery. But none of that makes “Ten German Bombers” any less tiresome.

It’s easy to sigh, shake your head and lament the sheer lack of grace on show every time England play in front of their travelling fans, but the prevailing sense is that it’s all just a bit weird.

Syria’s World Cup dream already sounds like a compelling story – and the BBC’s Richard Conway and Dave Lockwood do it thorough justice.

On this very day in 1988, on a very well-manicured Wembley pitch, England traded blows with Ruud Gullit, Ronald Koeman and co in a pre-Euros friendly. Tony Adams scored at both ends (well, actually, at the same end), John Bosman (not that one) sent a bullet header past Peter Shilton, and it ended even stevens.

A matter of weeks later, Holland rocked up at Euro ’88 with a shiny new kit, Marco van Basten and blew everyone away (including a miserable England.)

Absolutely nothing, for there is nothing more empty than a Thursday that falls between an international double-header. Read a book or something, and by “something”, I mean watch old football matches on YouTube.