Lee Carsley’s inability to give a straight answer about his England future is now farcical. It feels like he’s nearing the end game, writes IAN LADYMAN after 3-1 win over Finland

No sooner had Jack Grealish stood at the edge of the pitch at Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium and expressed his confidence in Lee Carsley than the England interim manager told the same TV station that the job was one for a world-class manager who had won trophies.

Ten minutes later, Carsley sat behind a table in a large room beneath the stadium and was asked, quite reasonably, whether he had finally ruled himself out of the race to become Gareth Southgate’s long-term successor.

“That would be a wrong assessment,” he said.

And so the Carsley merry-go-round continues to spin. To say the mood in England has changed since Carsley played through his first two Nations League games in September would be an understatement.

The messages at the time were only positive. Carsley felt fresh, new and brave and his first team reflected that. The 50-year-old said he wanted England to play ambitiously and they did, albeit against modest opposition.

Much of that optimism has now unfortunately disappeared. A lamentable home defeat to Greece last Thursday put a huge peg in the Carsley balloon and his subsequent rhetoric around whether he wants the England job has only reflected that achievement in terms of confusion and contradiction.

Carsley is a good guy who is doing his best to help the FA out of a difficult situation. But the question of whether or not his hat is in the ring in terms of the big job has now reached farcical levels.

He could choose to end the discussion. He could choose to answer clear questions with clear answers. Likewise, he could declare that he was not at all willing to talk about the matter until the end of his six-match gap in a month.

But no. Instead, we now seem stuck in the middle of a game of claim and counterclaim. Quotation and counter-quotation. The more Carsley says about this, the darker the picture becomes. It’s not really his fault. In fact, it’s hard not to feel sorry for him. But this is the task for England. Nowhere in the job description does it say this is easy.

The prevailing wind continues to blow towards the feeling that Carsley doesn’t want this job, and that’s completely fair. It’s just puzzling that he chooses not to say it.

He is a coach through and through. That’s why he still works with young players at the Strachan Academy domestically on Fridays. He still carries on the duties of England Under-21 coach and he reminded us of that on Sunday.

As far as the senior team is concerned, the mood has definitely changed. This performance in Helsinki’s beautiful and sympathetically renovated Olympic Stadium was unexciting but satisfying enough. After last week’s experiments against Greece, Carsley returned to something approaching a conventional squad. England weren’t particularly expansive or entertaining, but they got the win they needed after the horrors of Wembley.

But it feels different now. A month ago we thought we were watching a manager take his first steps towards the future. Carsley stated that he was not deterred by the job and said he was ready for everything it brings, on and off the field.

Now it feels very much like England is in some sort of holding pattern. A pause button has been pressed due to Carsley’s hesitation. And now we must return to the desperately difficult question: if not Lee, then who?

On Sunday evening on TV, Roy Keane happily threw Pep Guardiola’s name into the night air. Not exactly a radical thought, that. If the FA want to appoint an Englishman, which they do, then the field of candidates is small. So the closer we get to a certain decision day, the further away an answer seems to be. It’s far from ideal as we can expect the World Cup qualifiers to start next March.

Meanwhile, familiar issues persist on the field. The problem of how on earth to formulate England’s attacking potential into some kind of coherent unit remains real. Cole Palmer came to this international break full of invention, running and goals for Chelsea. Yet he returns to his club having barely left a visible footprint in these two matches. The same can be said again of Harry Kane, who returned to the team after missing the Greece match but contributed little more than the sustained effort we have come to expect.

The truth is that too many English players continue to leave their club form at home when they join England.

Grealish was progressive here against a robust Finnish team who could have scored at least two more goals than the one they took at the death. Meanwhile, Trent Alexander-Arnold scored a super free kick. However, England’s busiest and most impressive player was midfielder Angel Gomes. I’m not sure what that tells us.

England’s mission was clear. They needed to win to erase last Thursday’s stain. With that done, Carsley will lead them to Athens next month, knowing that a decent win will put them back in charge of the group.

Carsley said here that he wished the match could take place next week. And that’s one of the problems with international management. A big part of the job is waiting, thinking and planning, and, well, waiting some more. It suits some coaches and not others, and the more we watch and listen to him, the more it feels like Carsley would be better suited for something else.

When asked here if the constant suspicion about his intentions was starting to irritate him a little, he said it wasn’t. It’s hard to believe him. There are a few options available to him as we go along, but he won’t be using them anytime soon.

And so we move on to November and the endgame. We think we now know how it ends. Overall, Carsley continues to look and talk like a man who knows his finish line is in sight.