The Three Lions met up last week to prepare for Monday’s Euro Qualifying game at the Ricoh Arena and initially spent time away from the training pitch to work on building the bond among what is a new squad.
But since arriving at St. George’s Park on Friday to start fine tuning his players for the game, Southgate has been pleased with what he’s seen.
England v Kazakhstan
UEFA European U21 Championship
Group 9 Qualifier
5.45pm, Tuesday 13 October 2015
Ricoh Arena, Coventry
Live on BT Sport
"We’ve had a good week’s training and a good week together with the team," said the head coach.
"The more they work together, the more they get an understanding of each other’s game.
"It takes time to understand each other’s game, the sort of runs that an individual might make and once you have an awareness of that, then intelligent players can start to find each other.
"But until you play together a little bit and start to get to know the movements, it’s not always straightforward to pick that up as a team and cohesion does take time.
"We’re not quite sure how it’s going to be yet, but with the way they’ve trained this week, we have every reason to believe that they’ll play well in Coventry.
"We have been able to focus on just one game and how we want to play generally, to get everyone on the same page and give them a clear understanding for the style we want to play.
U21s head coach @GarethSouthgate looking forward to seeing his side express themselves @RicohArena in #ENGvKAZ later https://t.co/LbezEeDXX3
— England (@england) October 13, 2015
"So we’ve been able to give that a bit more focus, which will be able to benefit us for the game with Kazakhstan and the games next month."
This is only England’s second game of the new qualifying campaign, whilst Kazakhstan are coming into their fourth.
But after his team started off with a hard-fought 1-0 win in Norway last month, Southgate is keen to see England build on that against a team he expects will make things hard.
"They’re very well organised with a threat on the counter attack," he explained. "They won in Bosnia, only lost in the last 10 minutes to Switzerland and lost late on against Norway last week.
"The name isn’t synonymous with high-level international football, but I think the performances are vastly improving and there’s been quite a bit of investment into football there.
"And we’re going to have to be balanced in transition to make sure we don’t get turned over on the counter attack.
"If we play as well as we can do, I believe we will win but we will have to play well because they’ll be stubborn opposition."
