Morgan Rogers: ‘I’m disappointed Cole Palmer’s not here but he’s got to look after his body’
· Yahoo Sports
England are based at Tottenham’s training complex in London this week, and on Friday the building was the scene of a flurry of media activity. There were questions about Saturday night’s opponents Spain, questions about English identity, questions about how players get over the heartache of losing to Argentina. But the most emotive was not really about football at all: where is Cole Palmer?
The answer was in the Caribbean, with a personal rehab coach to work on his fitness. Palmer’s decision to pull out of this three-week, four-game England camp was put down to “load management” after a campaign disrupted by injury last season. It clearly irked England manager Thomas Tuchel.
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“He misses too many opportunities,” said Tuchel. “I don’t blame him for it. It is just a fact. He misses way too many camps with injuries. I only want to rely on what I witness and see within my team, and for that you have to be in camp.”
While Tuchel was delivering some home truths downstairs in Tottenham’s glass-fronted centre, Morgan Rogers was upstairs defending his close friend and Chelsea teammate. “Unfortunately he couldn’t be here, but I think he’s got to focus on his body after what he went through last year,” Rogers told a huddle of journalists. “He needs to be in a good physical state and that obviously comes first as players. You want to be in the best fighting-fit shape if you can.”
Does Rogers miss his best mate in football, the player he roomed with for so many years playing together in England’s youth teams, and now his partner in crime at Stamford Bridge?
“Nah, I'm all right having the break from him, to be honest,” Rogers smiled. “Being around him 24/7 can be quite tough, so having the break’s quite nice. But of course, I love playing with Cole. I love being around him … I’m disappointed he’s not here, obviously, from a selfish point of view. But I know it’ll do him the greater good moving forward, that we can get the best version of him throughout the whole season and in an England shirt moving forward.
“I think as a nation you want Cole Palmer and players like that in an English shirt, but it’s not always possible with the games and what we’ve got coming up. You have to manage yourself, especially after what he went through last year, he doesn’t want to go through that again. So he’s made a decision for himself to look after his body.”
Palmer and Rogers, centre, have made a fast start to the season (Reuters)The scrutiny is a little unfair on Palmer, given Declan Rice pulled out on similar grounds while Tino Livramento, Kobbie Mainoo and Marcus Rashford also turned down call-ups citing minor fitness issues. At the same time, it is hard to imagine Palmer would have dropped out had Chelsea been playing a Premier League game this weekend.
Fitness concerns haven’t stopped Palmer and Rogers making a formidable start to the season, recording seven goals and six assists between them, even if their attacks have been interspersed with occasional breaks to rub their eyes in disbelief as a Chelsea defender makes another catastrophic error.
Rogers said when he arrived at Chelsea that a big draw was Xabi Alonso’s tactical ideas, which he felt suited his game, and the 24-year-old has quickly settled into one of the two roving No 10s with Palmer behind Joao Pedro, where he has licence to drift wide and use his pace and skill to weave to the byline, or to stay inside and use his strength and close control to bully his way into the box.
“I'm happy, I'm enjoying my football,” he said. “I'm feeling as good as I've ever felt playing, contributing, scoring goals, assists, creating chances. I'm loving it. It's been challenging at times, obviously a good start and then tailored off a bit at the end, which is disappointing. But that’s football, and I just can’t wait to get going and keep going and keep pushing myself and keep trying to improve.”
England will need Rogers’ direct approach as they try to counter the control game of world champions Spain at Wembley. One of the overriding debates in the World Cup postmortem – posed by Tuchel in the case for his own defence — was whether England have enough technical quality and mental resolve to keep the ball under pressure, when 1-0 up in a semi-final, when Argentina are throwing everything they have in a quest to equalise. Is it in their “DNA”?
Rogers holds off Argentina's Nicolas Tagliafico (Getty)“We’re definitely good enough to do it,” Rogers said. “But there’s not many teams in the world who can do that. Even in the Premier League, if you play Man City and they go 1-0 up I bet they have a period of pressure in the game where they’re a bit under the cosh and it’s difficult. It’s just natural, you can’t help it. Especially in a World Cup semi-final in that moment. I was on the pitch, I felt it, we’re doing everything we can not to let them score and sometimes that can be a negative thought.
“Maybe we do need to learn and improve on how we can make it 2-0, 3-0. We all want that. It’s just difficult in that moment. We’ve also got a lead and want to win the game. It’s a tough position to be in. They’re going to bring everything at it. More goes into it than ‘we’ve scored and just completely sit back’. You’ve got to take into account that they have half an hour to change it, otherwise they’re out of the World Cup.”
With a Nations League campaign ahead, and a home Euros on the horizon, perhaps the most important question is what England learnt from that night. How do they stop the same thing happening again?
“We’ve had that conversation internally and that’s something we’re definitely going to learn from. It’s a lot of players who experienced that environment for the first time. You don’t know how you’re going to fare and react. Knowing we’ve gone through it, as heartbreaking as it was, I’m hoping that experience will put me and the group in massive stead going forward, that in those situations we can remember how it felt when the whistle went in that game, of how the last half an hour felt.
“We don’t want that to happen. If we do lose, which can happen, we want to go out in a different way than we did. It just felt a bit sour, the way it ended, feeling deflated at not being able to give much in that last half an hour. We probably had more to give with the quality of players we have. You have to go through failure to come out the other end.”