Two months after Phil Neville took charge of the England women’s team, he faced his first big challenge as a manager. Last March, England went to the SheBelieves Cup in the US and faced three of the top four ranked teams in the women’s game: France, USA and Germany.

In his first game in charge, Neville came up against France – a team England had beaten just once in 44 years. The new manager oversaw a 4-1 victory, with goals from Toni Duggan, Jill Scott, Jodie Taylor and Fran Kirby securing an impressive start to his reign. Here, Neville explains the approach he took in that game and how he has adapted England’s style of play since to give them the best chance of succeeding at the Women’s World Cup this summer.

Be brave in defence

“When I came in to this job, the big thing I wanted was for us to play a certain style of football. That was playing out the back and through the thirds. But, before my first game in charge, against France in the SheBelieves Cup, we only had two days of training. So, you’re talking about changing a team’s style of football in two training sessions, which is absolutely impossible.

For that tournament, we were away for eight days in total, which consisted of three and a half training sessions, which made it very difficult to implement the style I wanted. So, I decided to keep things really simple for the three games in America.

The first thing we did was to choose the system we wanted to play, which was 4-3-3. The next thing wasn’t really tactical. It was about saying to the players: we’ve got to be brave on the ball, we’ve got to be bold, we’ve got to be courageous.

We wanted our back four to play really expansively. Both our full-backs like to get forward anyway, but the key thing for me was to get our centre-backs really wide. We also wanted to create a superiority in the middle of the pitch and get our No 4 four on the ball – because we knew that, against a team like France who play 4-4-2, that middle section was going to be really important.

Dominate the midfield

We also asked our left-sided player, Toni Duggan, to come in and play a bit more narrow so we would create a four-v-two or four-v-three in the centre of the pitch – because, if you create an overload in midfield, then you’re going to control the game. For a team that was just beginning to show signs that they wanted to change their style, it was important to build belief so that the team would be confident to actually have possession of the ball.

Beyond the tournament, we knew we had to be flexible – you can’t just say: we are going to play 4-3-3 and this is going to be our stock system from now until the day that you leave the job. So, we wanted to develop two systems: 4-3-3 and 4-2-3-1. In the first six months we decided to focus on these systems and make sure that we got the principles right before we started changing or tweaking them.

Break teams down in attack

One thing I learned early on is that, particularly in the women’s game, we’d play against teams that were ranked between 20 and 50 in the world that would play really deep – in a low block, which meant that literally everybody was behind the ball. And we found that by playing 4-3-3 against that, our centre-forward became really isolated and would have four or five opposition players around them.

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I’d never seen that type of low block before: it was literally 11 players behind the ball. So you were facing a back six – sometimes a back seven – which forced your centre-forward to drop into midfield. There was no space for our attacking players to create any spaces or movement.

So, I went away in the summer and thought long and hard about how to get our creative players on the ball against a low-block team. We knew we had to focus on two things: firstly, ensuring our players were used to receiving the ball in really tight areas with three or four players around them. So, we condensed our possession practices into tight areas so that their touch had to be right, their awareness had to be right, the pace of pass, the side that they pass the ball in, had to be absolutely perfect, and that really helped us.

The second thing we had to focus on was our final-third play. Because, when you have 11 players banked in rigid, like mannequins, it’s very difficult to move them in such a small space. So we had to create one-v-one situations and have players who could receive the ball with a player really tight to them and have the ability to turn and beat them in a one-v-one situation. We worked really hard on that.

Final-third play is always the most difficult to coach because you want to create a freedom to express. Yes, you have set movements, but you also want players to be free to do what they feel is best – wingers who want to play off the cuff, and do what they need to do to beat a player. So, we had to really drill into players that the final third is the most important. The final third is when your touch, awareness, ability, confidence and belief to beat a player have to be really good.