England's big name players have not brought their true selves to this stage - they look lost and are a team waiting to be beaten, writes IAN LADYMAN

England are not only bad but they are boring too. It's a terrible and depressing combination and the worrying thing about another night of nothing in Germany is that Gareth Southgate and his players are showing absolutely no sign of finding a solution to a puzzle born of misapplication and confusion.

Southgate called an end to the Trent Alexander-Arnold midfield experiment here in hot and heavy Cologne and gave Conor Gallagher of Chelsea a try. That didn't work. Gallagher was anonymous and was replaced at half-time by Manchester United's Kobbie Mainoo. That brought about a little improvement but not enough.

The truth is that this mess is not necessarily about personnel. It's about belief and attitude and freedom of thought. England have none of it at the moment and that goes from front to back. The midfielder Declan Rice - someone on whom we can usually rely - had promised England would play with freedom. They didn't. We were told England would be off the leash. Maybe they were but that only enabled them to run around without direction.

England had more of the ball than against Serbia and Denmark but then their opponents here were ranked lower than Scotland. On the whole they did absolutely nothing with it. The statistics at the end of the game showed that the England players who had completed the most passes were the four defenders. Sideways and back. Sideways and back.

This is not the England we know. This is England from the bad old days of fear and self-loathing. From the days of talk and no action. How dismal it is to find ourselves back here again. Somehow England have won the group and are now in the slightly more palatable side of the draw. But that doesn't matter. They are a team waiting to be beaten.

Slovenia, to be correct about it, never looked like doing that. They never looked like heaping the ultimate humiliation on their storied opposition. They never looked liked scoring and didn't create a worthwhile chance.

Neither did England, though, and Southgate's reshuffle in the middle of the field didn't really achieve anything at all. As expected, Gallagher was given his opportunity but failed to take it. Indeed he didn't touch the ball at all in the opening 10 minutes.

Southgate and his coaching team are aware of Gallagher's technical limitations. They brought him here to Germany to ideally use as an impact sub, a player who could be sent on late in games to try and drag England up the pitch. Here he was asked to do that job from the start. To say it didn't work is an understatement.

Meanwhile Southgate had said as Mainoo arrived on the scene this season that England would be a little more open with him in the team. The national coach is a former defender and often returns to those very first instincts.

But England had laboured so much that something had to give, a risk of some degree had to be taken. And England were better with Mainoo on the field. The United academy graduate has a neat touch, nimble feet and can manoeuvre the ball quickly.

For a while there was a greater urgency to England's football and he played his part in that. But how much of England's territorial dominance in the second half was down to a marginal improvement or merely Slovenia's understandable tendency to retreat in search of a valuable point is hard to say.

What is clear is that England's big name players have not brought their true selves to this stage. In order for England to improve on what they had given before here, each player had to step up by 10 or 20 per cent. That was always going to be much more important than personnel or tweaks to formations.

The truth is that it didn't happen. Jude Bellingham continues to play as though the football has his name on it and gives out less than satisfactory messages in body language when things don't go his way. At the moment that is often and if the 20-year-old really does wish to be seen as a leader of this team then he must do better than that. One imagines, he will feel that none of this is his fault.

Southgate made changes as time wore on. Cole Palmer got 19 minutes. Anthony Gordon got one minute. And then on came Alexander-Arnold and that seemed fitting. England had come full circle to find themselves back in the same place. Lost.