Ivan Toney’s stellar start to the season for Brentford has earned him a call-up to Gareth Southgate’s England’s Nations League games next week.
The next time Southgate names an England squad, it will be his World Cup squad. So what are the omens for Toney? Which other uncapped players have come into England squads at this late stage before a World Cup and have they gone on to great things? Or even to the World Cup?
In the unlikely event Ivan Toney is reading this, a quick message: Ivan, don’t read this. It… it doesn’t look good.
Disclaimers and caveats time: obviously this season’s timings make things a bit different but all those below were uncapped when named in the final in-season squad before a World Cup summer. Usually around March or April, which is basically where we are now on the Qatar timeline. So it kind of works, yeah?
April 2002 – Matt Jansen
The England squad selected for a 4-0 win over Paraguay is dominated by the birth of a legend. A week before the game, three days before Sven-Goran Eriksson names a 25-man squad and 51 days until the World Cup begins, David Beckham is given a booting by Deportivo La Coruna’s Pedro Duscher in a Champions League quarter-final. His foot is bruised and bleeding. The following day, an X-ray confirms he has broken the second metatarsal in his left foot. “What the f**k is a metatarsal?” asks a confused and concerned nation that will never again have to ask that question and is about to embark on a period of widespread collective insanity that feels strangely apt 20 years on.
All we’re saying is that if there was a queue to pay your respects to Beckham’s bust foot, it would have been at least 12 hours long. Tabloid front pages encouraged readers to pray for the injury to recover. It was the biggest story in town from that moment until Beckham, whose narrative arc appeared to have been completed with that crucial goal against Greece, was confirmed fit and would complete the actual end of this particular redemption story with the winning penalty against Argentina after a genuinely hilarious dive from Michael Owen. Then he jumped out of the way of a tackle in the build-up to a Brazil goal in the quarter-final. Was he thinking about his half-healed foot? We’ll never know. What we do know is that the man who initially benefited from Beckham’s injury was, to general surprise, Blackburn’s Matt Jansen.
A stomach bug forced him to withdraw from the squad and, despite being measured…
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