Women’s World Cup: England to take a leaf out of Big Sam’s book

Head coach Mark Sampson is happy to win ugly in Edmonton as his Lionesses prepare to take on the pass masters Japan in Wednesday night’s semi-final



For someone who professes not to believe in fate, Mark Sampson is behaving somewhat strangely. As he sits talking in the lobby of an Edmonton hotel, England’s head coach keeps returning to the subject of destiny, to the sense the country’s name may just be written on the World Cup.
“Something’s happening, you can’t deny it,” he says, a slightly evangelical glint in his eye. “I’ve told the players I don’t believe in fate but something’s happening with this team and in this tournament for England. We’ll keep believing and keep fighting and make it a blooming difficult game for Japan. We really think something’s going on that’s telling us that we’ve got a bigger part to play here
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Wednesday night’s semi-final opponents promise to put this theory to the test. Quite apart from being the World Cup holders, Japan are the only team to have won all their matches during Canada 2015 and they play an intricate, possession-based, passing game that Sampson acknowledges England cannot hope to emulate.

This reality explains why he has come over a little Sam Allardyce or even Tony Pulis on the eve of English football’s first semi-final since Sir Bobby Robson’s team reached the final four of Italia 90.
“If you offered me any win against Japan, however it comes, I’d bite your arm off and your two legs,” says Sampson, who is refreshingly candid about England’s dependence on set pieces and physicality.
Significantly Lucy Bronze’s decisive scoring header against Canada followed a superb Fara Williams free-kick while a well-executed Williams corner prompted Steph Houghton’s headed equaliser against Norway.

“Without goals from set pieces we wouldn’t still be in the tournament,” he says. “Our two key moments have come from set pieces. A well worked corner routine against Norway, a perfectly worked free-kick against Canada, so we know how important they are.


“We spoke to the players before the tournament and said, if you look at the history of the World Cup, the likelihood is that, if you’re going to win it, there will be at least two games where the decisive moment is a set piece. We’ve already had two and, if we were to get a third, it would almost certainly put us in the final and in a great place.”
Recent days have seen Sampson up-grade his catchphrase “We’re in a good place” to “We’re in a great place”.

Quite apart from hours of exhaustive research and training-ground practice, there is clearly a strong dynamic, a real chemistry, between the 32-year-old and his players. A coach unswerving in his admiration of Roberto Martínez, whom he once worked under at Swansea, would ideally prefer to pass Japan off the pitch but accepts that, at this stage of the English game’s evolution, pragmatism offers the only hope of progress.
“My objective is to be a winning coach,” he says. “We’ve got to make sure we disguise weaknesses Japan can potentially expose. We’ve got some tall players and we’ll have no hesitation in using size as a weapon. We’ve certainly shown we’re one of the best sides here in second-ball possession and we’re also a set-piece team. We have some strong routines we feel can really hurt Japan.”

Like a lot of sides suited to operating on the counterattack, there are moments when England seem almost more dangerous without possession than when they actually have the ball. “I think people forget that, if you’re clever, you can set up spaces to exploit on the counterattack when you haven’t got possession,” Sampson says. “We move our defensive players around in a way that allows us to hurt opponents in the spaces we create. I’m really pleased with the way the players have been able to do that. We move players into places which stop passing lanes and deny opponents room. That encourages certain passes which enable us to set a trap and pounce on the counterattack.

“If we want to win the World Cup, we have to continue doing that. We’re under no illusions that, if we’d tried to play like the Brazil of the 1970s, we’d have gone out at the group stage and we wouldn’t be front page news in England.”

Now only the beauty and symmetry of Japan’s football stands between England and Sunday’s final in Vancouver. “We’re playing a team who are in love with football,” he says. “They get the ball, they want to keep it, they want to move it into areas where they can pull you about. We have to be accept there will be times when they will dominate possession but we’ve got weapons that can hurt them.”