Danny Higginbotham: Malta will defend for their lives against England, just like I had to when playing for Gibraltar

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.