Hodgson: Gary Cahill's the man for the big occasion

England boss Roy Hodgson believes his central defender Gary Cahill performs better in big matches.

Cahill, 28, has become an integral part of the Three Lions set-up in recent seasons after making his debut against Bulgaria in 2010.

He has won 29 caps and was in the England squad for this summer’s World Cup in Brazil.

And Hodgson has praised Cahill's “quiet authority” and his professional attitude.

He said: “He seems to be more and more comfortable with the responsibility of the top matches i.e. England, Champions League and Premier League.

“I think he has a quiet authority, I think he's someone who really knows what his job is, takes the job very seriously and works very hard to get better in that job.

“I think he's entitled to a good status because over the last couple of years in particular his partnership with John Terry [has been] really good.”

Hodgson continued: “He's still relatively young. He's still relatively new to the England set-up. He's got 29 caps. In international terms that's not enormous. He's one of our most experienced players with 29 caps, but he's still not enormously experienced in terms of Terry and [Rio] Ferdinand who preceded him.

“You gain as you go along. You get, with experience, stronger and probably more vocal as well. I think he already realises that we rely on him quite heavily as one of our senior central defenders with [Phil] Jagielka.”

Cahill has been included in Hodgson’s squad for the upcoming Euro 2016 qualifying double-header against San Marino and Estonia.

England opened their campaign with an impressive 2-0 win in Switzerland – a match in which Hodgson employed a 4-4-2 diamond formation, one he said he is not afraid to try again.

He added: “Keep the diamond? I would hope the players will be flexible and intelligent enough to be able to vary.

“I wouldn't like to think we are going to be 100 per cent hung up on whatever you like to call ‘systems’. We worked on the basis that we had three players we thought could be important to us in our attempts to win the game.

“We thought the best positions for those players would be this, and then we worked around it. We could have said, well, we would like [Raheem] Sterling to play here but it doesn't suit our system so we will play him there. But we didn't want to do that.

“There might be other occasions we don't have the forwards we want but it is nice to know that even with such a relatively short period of time the players were able to understand what we were thinking and give us a pretty good example of it.”

Tickets for England’s game with San Marino at Wembley on Thursday are on sale by clicking here or calling 0844 826 2010