Pickford needs to be dropped. Fighting his way back in to the first team would do him the world of good.
Same thing happened with Southall in his early days. Kendall didn't hesitate to drop him, he worked his way back into squad, and the rest is history.
Pickford has that potential, as the Spurs game showed, and is still young for a keeper. He's by no means the finished product.
Ironically, I don't think being England's no.1 is helping him at all. I wonder if it's putting pressure on the Club to keep him as our 1st choice. Because if he loses his England spot due to being benched by us, so losing both at the same time, that could have a detrimental effect on his confidence.
Nothing ironic about it. The fanfare has gone to his head and he believes his own hype.
I've said this before. International play is such a different animal. The teams are much less cohesive than clubs because they play together infrequently. They don't know each other that well and they know the opposition less well or barely at all. The quality of the football is not nearly as good as the top sides in top leagues. The games are on a huge stage. There are fewer games - a WC winner will have played all of 7 matches in the finals before lifting the Cup. Add it all up and the whole thing runs on emotion and adrenaline, more than football schemes and skills. In that setting it's very easy for a player - especially a keeper, since they're always in the spotlight - to make a name for himself by making one or two huge plays. That's exactly what JP did and he seems to thrive in that atmosphere, where he can jump around, be showy, pump his fists in front of a crowd of 100,000 people, billions watching around the world, and not have to worry overmuch about sticking with a plan, since there isn't much of one.
Much different than, say, staying within yourself and executing on your manager's scheme again and again and again over the course of a long domestic season, including the proverbial rainy night at Stoke - or, here, a Wednesday night cup tie away to lower-league opposition (without a crowd, no less). Spotlight near zero, second-string squad in front of him, raining, in a small town, nobody cares that much, another league game coming up at the weekend, another cup tie a couple days after that, etc. etc.
The attention wanders. And here we are.
