Danny Higginbotham: Malta will defend for their lives against England, just like I had to when playing for Gibraltar
SunSport columnist Danny Higginbotham recalls the heroic 0-0 draw Gibraltar picked up against Slovakia three years ago
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I KNOW how the Malta players will be thinking at Wembley, because I’ve been there.
In November 2013, I was in the Gibraltar team that played our first international as a Uefa member against Slovakia — having qualified through my grandmother.
We knew people were talking about us getting beaten by six or seven.
For the first ten or 15 minutes we were running everywhere and I had to tell them to calm down and try to stick to our strengths, which was to defend in numbers.
We had no expectations on us, so the 0-0 draw was a fantastic result. That only happens if people are willing to stick together and do things they wouldn’t usually do for their club sides.
More often than not, the players who are in the team play for the best sides in their domestic leagues and are used to attacking and winning.
But when they play for the national side they have to become selfless and change their way of playing.
By the end, if you look at the touch maps, you’ll find nine of the outfield players will be grouped within 35 yards of their own goal.
The keeper doesn’t try to play it out from the back and so it ends up being 90 minutes of attack versus defence.
At Wembley, Malta will have the same gameplan we did — to defend for as long as you can and as well as you can, sitting deep and staying there.
They will consider it a victory every ten minutes they go without conceding another and might as well not even play a centre-forward because they end up isolated.
The whole team drops so deep and nobody ever gets close to joining them.
They are just waiting for the inevitable to happen.
For a defender that’s not really a problem.
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It’s what you do naturally and you should be able to keep your concentration.
But it’s more difficult for a midfielder or attacking player to sacrifice himself and think that you’re only going to do the dirty work, when that isn’t what you do in a normal match. It’s a very different mindset.
The other thing is that if you’re not on the ball very much, you have to run that much further. By half-time you’re shattered.
At 0-0 you have something to hold.
That makes you prepared to run the extra five or ten yards, make that tackle.
It’s harder to find the motivation to do that when it’s about how many you’ll lose by.
The trouble is, once you concede the first goal, most teams who set out with damage limitation in their heads don’t really have a Plan B.
Once you concede, Plan A has failed.
That deflates you and having no Plan B usually leads to conceding more goals.
When you’re playing lesser teams, you have to accept you might go 35-40 minutes without scoring but once you get the first, the next three or four come more easily.
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