Cole Palmer has to start for England in the Euro 2024 knockouts – but how does he fit in to Gareth Southgate’s struggling attack?

Palmer has been characterised from his fearlessness since he was a child and dribbling around older kids in the park next to where he grew up in Wythenshawe. The south Manchester neighbourhood, where Marcus Rashford also hails from, is known for being the largest council estate in Europe and, in the words of Palmer’s father, Jermaine, “a bit of a rough area”.

When Conservative party leader David Cameron went to visit in 2007, a hooded teenager was photographed with his fingers pointed towards him in the shape of a gun. It is the place that sitcom ‘Shameless’ was modelled on, the town where Tyson Fury grew up and trained to become world heavyweight champion.

“All the lads would come in and it’s fair to say some of them would not like it when this little kid was trying to take the p*ss out of them!” Jermaine Palmer told The Telegraph, also regaling tales of his son, who he described as “a cheeky little kid”, winding up the 18-year-old substitutes on the sidelines while watching him play for his pub team.

Manchester City’s academy added tactical intelligence and technical ability to that sense of swagger and daring to create the player that Palmer is today. He typically had no nerves about his first training session with Pep Guardiola’s first team.

“We were doing this 11-a-side game, and the ball just dropped for me. I was far out but I felt confident, so I just whacked it,” he recalled to The Players’ Tribune. “It ended up smashing off the corner where the bar meets the post. Riyad [Mahrez] got it, crossed it back to me and I scored. I just went home saw my dad and I said ‘I think I can play with them’ and he was like ‘Yeah so do I’. And from there I’ve just always been confident.”

Palmer was so confident that he felt he deserved more than his substitute’s role under Guardiola, and when Chelsea offered to pay £42.5m ($54m), it looked like shrewd business from City. Chelsea have had the last laugh, though, as their summer signing smashed in 25 goals and provided a further 13 assists in his debut season.

Palmer demonstrated to his former club that his self-confidence was not misplaced but fully justified, and England need that sense of belief now more than ever.

Palmer is far from the only quality attacker in this England squad, but the pressure and criticism seems to be grinding away at key players such as Harry Kane and Declan Rice, with even Jude Bellingham showing negative body language as he grew increasingly frustrated against Slovenia.

Palmer showed no signs of being affected by that pressure when he replaced Bukayo Saka in Cologne. He dragged defenders all over the place and created space that was not previously there. England may not have scored, but their best moves all came when Palmer was on the pitch. The shackles were off and they finally looked dangerous.

“Every time he’s got the ball he’s looking to eliminate opponents, every one of his incursions takes somebody out of the game,” said Tottenham manager Ange Postecoglou on ITV. “When you have a player like that, irrespective of how the opposition is set up in a defensive sense, he’ll always find that gap, those spaces.

“His first thought is ‘how can I eliminate one of the opposition or a line of the opposition?’. Those kind of players are rare. I don’t think they need protection, they need to be thrown out to play.”

Palmer started both of England’s warm-up friendlies against Bosnia & Herzegovina and Iceland as Bukayo Saka was still easing his way back from the injury he suffered at the end of the season, but the Arsenal man has been preferred for the three matches at Euro 2024.

That is understandable given Saka’s standing in the England team, and he has been one of the brighter players in this dull campaign, setting up Bellingham’s diving header against Serbia and providing thrust down the right-hand side that has been missing from the opposite flank.

And there is a strong argument to switch left-footed Saka to left-back to give England more balance as they have been lopsided due to Kieran Trippier playing in the position in the absence of Luke Shaw. Shaw is approaching full fitness and has returned to team training, but it would be too risky to start him against Slovakia. And playing Saka at left-back would allow England to deploy Palmer on the right of the attack.

It is an option that appeals to Ian Wright. The former Arsenal and England striker said: “I’m feeling how are we going to get Palmer in to the team? With how naturally left-sided Saka is, maybe can you put Saka at left-back and put Palmer on the right-hand side because we need to get some balance and some fluidity into the game.”

If playing Saka in a role he has not played for over four years is deemed too risky, an alternative move would be to keep the Arsenal man where he is and put Palmer on the left of the attack. That position could be vacant on Sunday as Phil Foden will have been away for three days to attend the birth of his third child.

Although Palmer’s best work at Chelsea has come cutting inside from the right, he is naturally left footed while also more than competent with his right. And for Gary Neville, the best players can play anywhere and do not need to be carefully slotted into a certain position.

“We’re the only country in the world that asks ‘Where can we fit this player in?'” he said. “Every other country seems to get them in, we struggle to get them in, we have to get them in. These are massive talents, huge talents, we can’t mishandle these talents, we really will regret it.

“These lads are there staring him (Southgate) in the face now. They’ve improved us enormously, the players who looked most comfortable on the ball. We looked so basic in the first half, that’s the rigid England we’ve seen in every tournament going back for 20 years. That second half [with Palmer] they looked like they were playing with a bit of flow.”

Neville was right and wrong. The England teams he was involved in were rigid, but Southgate’s arrival eight years ago ushered in a new era of freedom and expression. That sense of excitement has been slowly eroded, however, and in Germany have England looked like their former selves, a team of experienced stars who are not as great as the sum of their parts.

Southgate has not tried to rock the boat, making just one change to his starting line up in the three games. But he needs to inject some youthful adventure back into the team and shake them back up. And who better to do that than Palmer, who was unaffected by the institutional instability at Chelsea.

“His attitude towards the game.. it wouldn’t make any difference the stage that he is coming in,” said Wright. “We’ve seen how he played at Chelsea, it was very chaotic but he’s just come in and ‘bam’.”

Even the infamously hard-to-please Roy Keane was smitten with Palmer. “I love Palmer, I think he’s amazing,” gushed the former Manchester United captain. “He’s so unpredictable, he can beat a man, go left or right. A lot of brilliant players affect the game, when he came on, you knew he was going to affect the game.

“Every time he gets the ball you think something is going to happen. He will think he should be in that starting XI. He won’t think I’m learning and I’m glad to be here,’ he will be looking at Gareth, thinking ‘get me out there”.’

That is certainly true. Be it taking on the older kids on the mean streets of Wythenshawe, in his first training session with Manchester City or in a Chelsea team that was falling apart around him, Palmer has always backed himself. It’s time to let him loose in Germany so he can drag this stumbling team back to their feet.