Gareth Southgate probably won’t be in his job in seven days’ time. If England win the final against Spain on Sunday, it will be Sir Gareth, and he’ll be off. If England lose, Southgate’s critics – temporarily silenced by the victory over the Netherlands – will re-emerge to slag off his ‘boring’ team for ‘bottling it’ again.
Southgate deserves better than this. He is not perfect, as some football journalists imply (you end up suspecting they’re particularly chummy with the right people). But it’s not over the top to say that Southgate is something special.
In 2018, he took England to the semi-finals of the World Cup, the first time since 1990. He took England to the final of Euro 2021, and has just repeated the achievement. True, we went out in the quarters in 2022, but against a France side that would end up making the final. He’s won more knockout games than every other England manager combined since 1966.
Southgate’s critics should also remember how bad the team he inherited was. When England lost 2-1 to Iceland at Euro 2016, an increasingly wheezy Wayne Rooney chuffed around in centre midfield; the goalkeeper Joe Hart had forgotten how to hold onto things. Gary Cahill lumbered about the pitch. Harry Kane was inexplicably taking corners. Sam Allardyce was appointed, which – thank God – didn’t last very long. The last resort stepped up, and showed some carefully calibrated ruthlessness in phasing out players like Rooney, so youngsters like Dele Alli and Jesse Lingard could start at Russia in 2018.
It takes a man of integrity, of uniquely honed man management, to turn an international team into heroes. With tournament football, teams only have a few weeks to prepare. Tactics are only so important. Spanish players entering the fray can fall back on knowing what they’re supposed to be doing – tiki–taka – and if you’re Italian, you learn to block all night long.
Without a distinctly English tradition of style, camaraderie matters far more, and it’s never inevitable. ‘Golden boys’ this England squad aren’t. They might not quite be the rascals that the England team of the 2000s were, but they still require some special care. Kyle Walker, Ivan Toney, Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden, Jack Grealish, James Maddison: all of these bad boys could have blown up. Yet, to Southgate’s credit, none have.
The main criticism of Southgate is that he’s dull. But since when did England fans start caring about style more than the result? Many supporters moan incessantly nowadays that Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City has made football boring. The idea is that, for most teams, style should not be the priority: winning should.
But that’s exactly the approach that Southgate has followed. The critics say that Southgate has never won a game that he probably shouldn’t have (except for the 2-0 win over Germany in 2021). But neither have they ever completely collapsed against a minnow.
English fans have become curiously continental in their expectations of how stylishly Mainoo, Foden and Saka should be linking up. Saka offers a good example of tournamental tactics done right: he’s played at right-wing, left-back, and right-wing-back over the past few weeks, exhaustively and without a strop.
The other main charge against Southgate is that he’s a coward. He waits too long to make subs, we’re told, and he picks his favourites. But then how do you explain him ruthlessly leaving out Jack Grealish and Marcus Rashford? He has been particularly brave at Euro 2024. Last night, with ten minutes to go in the semi final against the Netherlands, he took off the Premier League player of the season and the most in-form striker in the world. One substitute (Cole Palmer) then set up another for the winner (Ollie Watkins). Compare that with the cowardice that other managers have shown this tournament: Portugal’s Roberto Martinez refusing to stand up to a rotten late-stage Cristiano Ronaldo, or Didier Deschamps’s insistence that France could win the tournament through own goals and penalties.
Euro 2024 doesn’t feel quite as magical as Euro 2020 or the 2018 World Cup. ‘It’s Coming Home’ only started being belted out this morning. On Sunday, there probably won’t be any madness: no jumping on buses or inserting flares up arses. Much of that misbehaviour at past tournaments was probably down to the sheer surprise of the 2018 run, and the post-Covid anarchy of 2021. Now, a sense of scholarly entitlement has crept in, so that when Jude Bellingham scores a 94th minute bicycle kick, the reaction isn’t crazed joy, but anger that it took so long.
I remember walking through central London after the Euro 2020 final. It was sinister and deeply sad. Cocaine was being taken in the street to cope with the pain, not to revel in the joy. Strangers who hours earlier had been hugging were growling at each other. It’s for this reason that Keir Starmer’s tease of announcing a bank holiday if England win is precisely the wrong thing to do. Everyone needs to calm down.
Southgate is not blameless. The shocking performances against Denmark, Slovakia, Slovenia and half of the Switzerland game were not part of the plan. But we’re still here in the final, and that takes some character. England will miss Gareth Southgate when he’s gone.
