World Cup 2018: Frank Lampard column on England v Tunisia - BBC Sport
Frank Lampard looks at the tactics England will need to beat Tunisia and believes the Dele Alli and Jesse Lingard combination will be key.
I am confident England will beat Tunisia because we have got better individual players and, as a team, we have looked good in our recent friendlies.

But I don't think we should underestimate them and it will be a difficult game - the opening match of the World Cup is never easy and it is even harder because we are expected to beat them.

In this scenario, if you go into a game thinking that as a player, then it can affect you negatively if things do not go as planned - if, say, after 20 minutes you are not having the kind of dominance that you thought you would.

That is when you need a cool head and that is where some of the players who have been in that situation before will be able to help, and ensure no-one panics.

For a lot of this squad, though, it is not just the first game of this tournament, it is their first game of any World Cup.

It will feel huge for the new boys in the England team and I know from my own experience that right now they will definitely be nervous.

There is no other tournament in football that, as I got close to it, made me feel the way a World Cup did.

I remember my nerves intensifying as we got closer to the start of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, with the journey over there, the build-up of fans, and fulfilling all our media commitments on top of the tension of waiting for the tournament to start.

But being nervous is not necessarily a bad thing. My best tournament for England was Euro 2004, which was also my first major finals.

I fed off that excitement in the days before it started and I probably had the fearlessness of youth.

It was all new and exciting for me so I would like to think a lot of our younger players can do the same and use the pressure to get pumped up and produce their best.

'The night before - when your nerves are worst'

The night before the first game is when your nerves are worst. The England staff will be putting on some activities for the players to try to keep them busy, but I was never one for that kind of thing.

When you get into that 24-hour period before a match, you tend to have your own routine - I tried to stick closely to the one I had week-in, week-out at Chelsea.

The most important thing at that point is probably not to over-think things because by then the work is done - the fitness work and the tactical work is all there, and it is just about getting yourself in the right frame of mind.

Things are never quite the same, though. Before our first game of the 2014 World Cup against Italy, I remember a couple of hundred fans were outside singing England songs while I was having a massage.

That changes the whole aspect of your thinking, but not in a negative way. I felt proud, and very patriotic that people had come all that way to Brazil.

A lot is said about our fans but, in my experience as a player at major tournaments, they have always been fantastic.

Whatever happens to England in Russia over the next few weeks, they will get nothing but support from our supporters who are out here.

The tactics England need to beat Tunisia

England must find a way through Tunisia's defensive block to start their World Cup with a win, and Dele Alli and Jesse Lingard will have a key role in making that happen.

I am expecting Tunisia's tactics in Volgograd on Monday to be the same as in their friendly against Spain last week, when they only lost 1-0 to a late goal.

They will have 10 men behind the ball, in a 4-5-1 shape, and England's task is to find an attacking formation that can break them down.

I think Gareth Southgate will go with the same approach he did against Nigeria at the start of June, when he used Alli and Lingard as attacking midfield players, as opposed to second strikers.

They will both be further forward than Jordan Henderson - who I think will get the nod in the role that Gareth calls the single pivot, or deeper midfielder - and they will be slightly behind Raheem Sterling.

Eric Dier would probably give the team more stability in midfield but Henderson adds a little more drive from that position, which England will definitely need in this game.

We are going to dominate possession so, up front, Harry Kane needs to be a target man who stays up there and pushes the Tunisia defence as far back as he can to leave some space for Sterling, who is likely to start ahead of Marcus Rashford.

Alli and Lingard also have to stay high because, with three central defenders and Henderson in the team, they will not need to come back and get the ball in their own half too much.

To make their role work, they will need to be mobile and find space in between Tunisia's lines, staying on the move to make angles so people behind them can play the ball through to them as quickly as possible.

That is something that England have struggled with in the past, because we have not looked for the forward pass. That has to change.

If we can find Alli and Lingard in some good attacking areas, they are both very clever players with great awareness, and they can hurt Tunisia from there.

Alli and Lingard have another responsibility too, which is to run beyond Kane and Sterling. For both of them, it is a big part of their natural game, although they are slightly different in the way that they do it.

Alli has got that real directness with his movement into the box, with those angled runs of his that I love seeing him do for Tottenham.

He might not be able to do that so much from this slightly deeper role, but he will definitely get some opportunities against Tunisia, and Panama too.

Lingard plays more off his intelligence, with his runs into the box after laying the ball off.

He can move the ball after making one or two touches and I love the way he sometimes just pops it off and instantly gets into good positions.

There is a nice balance between them as a pairing - the only problem for them will come as England go further into the tournament.

Against stronger sides, they will have to take on the more disciplined side of the role, which will find them having to do a lot more work further back, but that is not an issue in these first two matches.

Frank Lampard was speaking to BBC Sport's Chris Bevan in Moscow.

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