Roy Hodgson's future visions with England now need grounding in the present

Roy Hodgson has a habit of keeping one eye on the future so he will doubtless be aware that were he to still be England manager in two years’ time, he’ll be making history – or at least, equalling it.

Only one other man, Walter Winterbottom, has managed the side at four major tournaments. If England avoid disgracing themselves in France this summer, there’s a good chance Hodgson could become the second.

“I have my sights firmly fixed on the future,” was his rallying call as his side departed for the last European Championships, in 2012. “I am not prepared to make the Euros the be-all and end-all in terms of the way I want to hopefully make a mark on the team and hopefully play in the future.”

“I think this team is still very young,” Hodgson reminded us after the three grim games that comprised England’s World Cup campaign two years later. “I’ve never doubted for one minute that as this team moves forward, not just to 2016, but even on from there, they will become stronger and better. The experience bodes well for the future.”

It is fitting, then, that there has been a greater focus on England’s future than usual as they go into this summer’s Euros. Gone at last are the days when the grizzled ‘golden generation’ were expected to deliver, and deliver big, in the here and now; instead, much of the talk lies around the core of nascent and quietly exciting talent that has presented itself to Hodgson since the debacle in Brazil.

While that tournament included both halves of the Gerrard-Lampard duo (combined age: 70) that had come to embody England’s inexplicable, inexhaustible wretchedness on the big stage, this time around Hodgson has named England’s youngest squad for 58 years, and the youngest of any nation heading to France. Marcus Rashford, whose emergence has come to epitomise the fearlessness and exuberance of England’s fledgling cohort, will be the tournament’s youngest player.

All of which has given Hodgson good reason to revisit a familiar theme. “I do believe that a lot of these players will go on to future tournaments and be even better than they will be this time,” he said, prior to naming his final 23 last month. “Most of them are at the start of their careers, and I am rather hoping they will be seen as players of potential.”

Certainly he’s right to be enthused by the quality of his young squad, even if much of that quality still remains latent. The problem for Hodgson, which has so often been the problem for Hodgson over the years, is that the glorious future he loves to assure us of must be balanced against the need to achieve something – anything – in the present.

This summer, that need will be stronger than at any point previously: it’s long been English ritual for the national team manager to be tarred, feathered and shown the door in the wake of a shoddy tournament showing and there is the strong sense that this championship will be the truest and fairest barometer of Hodgson’s project after four years in the job (and what have essentially amounted to two no-strings test-runs, in 2012 and 2014).

“My view would be that he would go on beyond the summer because at this moment in time he's doing the right things and making the right decisions, not just for himself, but for the team long-term,” said Gary Neville last week.

And while you wouldn’t expect Hodgson’s right-hand man to say much else, there is certainly evidence that the current regime is now guiding the ship firmly in the right direction. England’s qualification process could hardly have been any more impressive: they were the first team in the continent to cross the finish line and went on to emerge as the only one with a perfect record. Only Poland scored more, and only Romania conceded less. So far, so good.

But a glance at recent history shows that a fine qualifying campaign can mean very little once the big day comes around. The bleak and brutal misery that was England’s 2010 World Cup, for instance, was prefaced by a bullish 10 games in which Fabio Capello’s exhilarant outfit outscored everyone else in Europe, and by some distance. Yet on the big occasion, that form didn’t provide any sort of protection against the timidity, tedium and fatalism that has come to characterise big-tournament England, with the team’s showing in South Africa calling to mind the journalist Martin Johnson’s analysis of the country’s cricketers prior to the 1986 Ashes: "There are only three things wrong with this England team. They can't bat, can't bowl and can't field."

Similarly, the lead-up to the Brazil World Cup, during which England appeared decent if rather rigid going forward and near-watertight at the back, was followed up by two games in which their defence was taken apart with faintly ludicrous ease, the attack looked largely toothless and Hodgson’s men were on their way home before they’d unpacked their suitcases.

None of which, however, is to say that the excellence of the last two years is suddenly meaningless, or indeed any less impressive at this stage. The tactical shortcomings that did for England in Brazil – most notably the lack of fluidity or dynamism in central midfield – have been addressed with laudable efficiency, and Hodgson’s persistence with Jack Wilshere shows an admirable drive to staff England’s engine room with its most modern-style operative. So too the knee-jerk conservatism that has long dogged Hodgson’s reputation – and reasonably so, whether he likes it or not – has been much less apparent of late, not least in the forward-foraging freedom granted to his full-backs.

In short, much reason for hope. The main question for a manager whose future remains uncertain is exactly what sort of a showing will be required in France for him to be granted an extended stay. And the answer – precluding the sort of eye-catching success that would see his side make it to the semis, or further – is likely to lie in the intangibles that inflect England’s next handful of games.

Will he be able to prevent this youthful new group – a group that, in his own words “are not weighed down by the sins of the fathers” – from becoming plagued with the big-stage self-doubt that did for his last two tournaments in charge, and England’s last two decades? Will he break the habit of a lifetime and send his team out to a crunch fixture with the shackles loosened, as would surely suit the players at his disposal?

Most basely: will he be able to inject a glimmer of the poise, joy and optimism that has been systematically drained from the England set-up over the past 20 years?

If there is evidence in the affirmative in the way his side take to the task at hand, then perhaps Hodgson will have earned himself a place in the history books. But to do so, the man with a fixation on the future and all its hypotheticals will need to produce something real in the present.