IT seems to be an accepted fact now that Gareth Southgate’s England teams played boring, unattractive football.

Sometimes, they did. But while the stodgy, one-dimensional fare that was served up in Germany earlier this summer might be hard to put the back of your mind, it’s factually inaccurate to suggest that Southgate’s England were always dull.

What about the 3-2 Nations League victory in Seville in 2018 when England put Spain to the sword, scoring three goals in the opening 38 minutes? Or, more recently, the 3-1 win at Hampden last September when Jude Bellingham ripped Scotland apart?

In major tournaments on Southgate’s watch, England put six past Iran and Panama. In qualifiers, they scored six against Bulgaria and seven against Montenegro in the space of a month in 2019.

Under Southgate, England tended to brush aside limited opposition fairly contemptuously. Which makes the mass hysteria that has followed Saturday’s routine win over the Republic of Ireland in Lee Carsley’s first game as interim boss somewhat hard to fathom.

Yes, England outclassed Ireland at the Aviva Stadium. But let’s not forget, this is an Ireland side that failed to qualify for this summer’s Euros, fielded a central midfield comprised of Southampton’s Will Smallbone and West Brom’s Jayson Molumby and couldn’t win at home to New Zealand last autumn.

Yes, England attacked with pace and purpose in an impressive first-half showing, and yes Carsley’s line-up was better balanced than Southgate’s selections at the Euros with Levi Colwill playing as a natural left-back, Anthony Gordon providing an attacking threat down the same flank and Jack Grealish linking play effectively as a ‘number ten’.

But again, this was all happening in a relatively meaningless Nations League game against Ireland. Had Southgate still been manager, I’d suggest there’s a very good chance he would have delivered a similar result and a broadly similar level of performance.

That’s not to suggest that Carsley does not deserve some credit for his first audition as stand-in boss, or to imply that he should not be considered a leading candidate for the full-time position.

It’s just an attempt to dampen down some of the wilder assessments that have appeared in the wake of Saturday’s game, and that might well surface again if, as let’s be honest is extremely likely, England outplay Finland at Wembley tomorrow. The reality is that it’s exactly what they should be doing, and what they were already doing under Southgate.

Carsley is not reinventing the wheel by bringing on Morgan Gibbs-White. He’s not ‘releasing the shackles’ by giving Grealish the freedom to roam around in the absence of Phil Foden and Jude Bellingham. Southgate is being judged on a 2-1 defeat to Spain in the European Championship final. Stacked against that, does a pair of Nations League wins over Ireland and Finland count for much?

England could win all six of this autumn’s Nations League matches under Carsley and it wouldn’t tell us anything about how the current stand-in would fare if he was to get the job on a permanent basis and have to take charge of a knockout game at a major tournament. Perhaps he’d be better equipped than Southgate was to lead England to victory. Perhaps he’d fail to get beyond the group stage.

It's all an unknown at this stage because, just as Southgate’s weaknesses were only exposed when England came up against one of the world’s leading sides, so a meaningful assessment of Carsley or any other managerial contender can only really be made when the level of opposition is significantly higher than either Ireland or Finland.

Release the shackles then, and that might count for something. Do it in a game like Saturday’s and it’s really just par for the course.