James Maddison is entitled to feel disappointed. He ran into an injury when his form was hot at Tottenham and returned to find his team misfiring and unsettled. Neither of those issues was of his making.
He has performed well when called upon by England recently, including a cameo from the bench against Bosnia and Herzegovina on Monday in Newcastle, when he helped lift the tempo in a friendly played at a pedestrian pace.
‘Devastated doesn’t quite cut it,’ said Maddison on Thursday, but he can have few complaints about the decision, and if reports of an immature exit tantrum are accurate, boss Gareth Southgate is entitled to think this selection call was spot on.
Questions about attitude have stalked the 27-year-old midfielder since his teenage years when, depending on who you ask, he was either blessed by extreme confidence or a bit too flash for his own good.
The fallout from the casino episode has been difficult to shake off. That was in 2019 when Maddison was uncapped.
He withdrew feeling unwell from Southgate’s squad before a Euro 2020 qualifier in the Czech Republic, only to be pictured at the poker tables in a Leicester casino on the night of the game.
A month later, he returned to win his first cap as a substitute against Montenegro, but waited more than three years for a second, after which he laughed off the poker furore, claiming it was ‘ridiculous’ and had been ‘blown out of proportion’, insisting it was ‘not a big deal for Gareth’.
Maddison likes to play cards and snooker, and enjoys a night at the darts so much that he has turned the arrows into his signature goal celebration, an opportunity Brentford forward and wind-up artist Neal Maupay found too hard to resist.
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After scoring the opener for the Bees at Spurs on Maddison’s first start after his injury, Maupay borrowed the move and celebrated by pretending to throw darts at a TV camera.
The pair exchanged words on the pitch and the contest became increasingly tetchy as Spurs ran out 3-2 winners, celebrating the goals with more imaginary darts. The silliness kept coming later.
‘He probably hasn’t scored enough goals in the last couple of years for his own celebration,’ said Maddison on TV, which prompted Maupay to respond on social media with, ‘More goals and less relegations in my career than James Maddison’.
On Thursday, as Southgate’s decisions crystalised, Maupay was back on social media to post a picture of himself holding three darts as the dartboard encircled his beaming face like a halo. Another comedy bullseye from Brentford’s answer to Jim Bowen is amusing enough and, although Maddison might need time to appreciate the funny side, it will boost the pair’s ranking in a desperately thin field competing to be the Premier League’s most interesting personalities.
Certainly, Maddison’s popular appeal is enhanced by his refusal to conform. His interviews are rarely coated in footballer’s vanilla. He has a sharp wit and a hint of smart-aleckery and is not afraid of his own opinion.
It is great for those of us in the media, but maybe not if you are the England manager wondering how he might react to a second major tournament in a row spent firmly on the fringes. It is true that others have made errors of judgment under Southgate and overcome them more easily. Phil Foden’s discipline let him down when he and Mason Greenwood broke strict lockdown rules to smuggle girls into the England hotel in Iceland in 2021.
That has not hindered Foden’s serene progress to 33 caps, although that is largely because he knuckled down and produced a sustained period of excellent form and a glittering array of medals for Manchester City.
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Unfortunately for Maddison, there is an abundance of talent in his position and he has not delivered the same numbers as others through the second half of the season.
He started brilliantly at Tottenham and faded at the end after three months out with an ankle injury.
Spurs followed a similar arc — they missed him when he was not there and Ange Postecoglou’s team were different by the time he came back. They were less fluent, not so slick and riddled with changes from one game to the next.
Maddison’s game is all about vision and perception.
He sees the patterns of play, detects the rhythms and finds connections. He threads incisive passes around the penalty box, creates space in congested areas and has a goal threat. Just the sort of thing that England need to unlock the deep defences they so often encounter.
Southgate, however, has a few others who can do something similar. Foden is Footballer of the Year and does those things consistently at an elite level for City. Cole Palmer’s goals in a prolific season at Chelsea have been crucial, easing him ahead of Maddison in the reckoning. Eberechi Eze was integral to the late flourish at Crystal Palace.
Jude Bellingham can operate in the same areas of the pitch as he does for Real Madrid, the European champions. The likes of Jarrod Bowen and Anthony Gordon bring other qualities, wide players who pack pace and intensity and run at defenders, providing a direct threat on the counter-attack.
At Spurs, Postecoglou’s high line squeezes the game into a smaller area, demanding the craft and guile of Maddison on the ball, enabling him to play in midfield without expecting him to win tackles, career from box to box or dominate the area physically.
England will not operate the same way, not least because they lack the same recovery speed at the back. So Southgate makes his squad calls on how he sees his team evolving through the group games against Serbia, Denmark and Slovenia and hopefully into different tests in Euro 2024’s knockout phase.
Does he have the balance to change shape from one type of opponent to another? To flex within a game using substitutes? Does he have the cover if he loses a couple of players?
There may be those questions at the back of his mind, along with the casino night and Maddison’s fitness record.
Physically, can he be relied on? An ankle injury ruled him out for nearly three months of his first season at Tottenham. A knee injury also restricted him in the early stages of his final season at Leicester.
Southgate took him to the World Cup in Qatar in 2022, where he was not fit for the first two games and not required for the other three.
But lingering doubts such as these would have been eclipsed by better form. The key factor in play is that Maddison’s form at Spurs since his return from the injury at the end of January punched holes in the case for his inclusion.
He has not scored for three months. He has scored once since the autumn. He ended the season with five goals.
Eze scored five in the last six games of the season for Palace and Palmer netted five in six days in the spring for Chelsea.
That will have trumped anything that happened in the casino.