Gareth Southgate is reaching the beginning of the end
It wasn't so much that England were boring, it's more that they were just plain bad. Yet all of this could still be forgotten in a couple of weeks time.
For how long the atmosphere has been growing this febrile is itself a matter of conjecture. If there was a Beginning of the End, it was probably the last European Championship. Somewhere between being held to a goalless draw by Scotland in their second match to losing the final on penalty kicks to Italy, patience wore thin.
#Southgateout remained something of a fringe pursuit until England’s elimination from the 2022 World Cup. Comfortable wins against Iran, Wales and Senegal were enough to get them to the quarter-finals and quieten some of the complaints, interrupted by a dull goalless draw against the USA, but it all went off after losing narrowly to France in the quarter-finals.
The first victim of the England manager’s position is moderation. Everybody has to pick a side and then dig in for the hot take wars. Southgate had been circling the drain of public opinion for some time, and two lacklustre performances against Serbia and Denmark have only increased the acceleration of that circling towards its near-inevitable conclusion.
So, let’s get the positives out of the way, shall we? They’re still in the competition and winning their group is still in their own hands. Harry Kane is off the mark in terms of goals. They hung on for the point, and the mournful atmosphere is clearly exaggerated by a current general climate of discourse in which the angriest and most swivel-eyed get the most engagement.
But that’s not many positives. And the list of negatives is, well, how long have you got? They range from the completely reasonable to the borderline unhinged, but what cannot be denied is that the list is substantially longer than the list of positives.
In the past, England have been boring. That much is undeniable. But very seldom has it been the case that they’ve been outright bad. And that’s what they were last night, whether it was a matter of trying the same thing repeatedly and getting the same results over again, sheer carelessness in the absolute basics of passing a football to each other, the timidity, or the almost complete abandonment of the left-hand side of the pitch.
This, in short, felt like the Gareth Southgate that his detractors had warned us of all along. It wasn’t really the Gareth Southgate of 2018 and it’s debatable whether it was entirely the Gareth Southgate of 2021, though the Gareth Southgate of 2024 does, it have to be said, bear something of a resemblance to the Gareth Southgate of 2009, when he was sacked as the manager of Middlesbrough, several months after getting them relegated from the Premier League.
There is, therefore, a conversation to be had concerning whether his time as the manager of this team has run its course, but it’s probably best for the sanity of all involved that this conversation happens after they’ve actually been eliminated from the competition. For now, what really matters is how both the manager and his team react to what should have been an extremely chastening experience against Denmark.
Because it is worth remembering the talent that England have at their disposal. Last season’s player of the year in both La Liga and the Premier League. The top goalscorer in the Bundesliga, who scored more than a goal a game last season even though his team only finished third in the table. Each of these players is valued at tens of millions of pounds. They can all play football. If there is a cause for frustration the morning after, it’s because we’ve all seen them turning out performances worthy of such status regularly throughout the season just ended.
Is it as simple as fatigue? This doesn’t seem likely. Premier League clubs play four more league matches a season than their counterparts in Germany and France, but of the other ‘Big Five’ leagues Italy and Spain also have 38-game seasons and it doesn’t seem to have rendered their players incapable of passing a ball forward twenty yards in a straight line to one of the players on the same team as them.
Is it ‘the pressure’? Well, that’s a highly subjective question to be asking in the first place, but shouldn’t players who play week in week out for such clubs as Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United be able to cope with that sort of thing? These are, after all, players who’ve played at the highest level, some of them for years.
Is it ‘the media’? We can all accept that there are vast swathes of the English media which are beyond repellent, but again while that’s a temptingly vague and populist option, it doesn’t really translate into the real world, does it? These players are hundreds of miles from England. They’re as shielded from the reality of having to deal with our glorious fourth estate as it’s possible for people in their position to be.
Truth is, none of us really know. If anybody did, these issues wouldn’t keep repeating themselves over time spans of generations, with completely different managers and completely different groups of players. No matter how much the outside world keeps changing, there’s something almost reliable about the extent to which this national team will turn up for a major tournament and do something like this.
And yet, and yet. We’ve been through this dozens of times before as well, haven’t we? Three years ago, England had just limped to a goalless draw against Scotland and, with them having scored just once in their first two games, the world was falling in. They ended up a penalty shootout from winning the tournament.
They’re still in this one. It could all yet happen again. It’s just that it seems extremely unlikely at the moment, is all, and that if there is a cycle to this sort of story happening over and over again, we all know where we are now; the endgame for Gareth Southgate, unless something dramatically changes, and quickly.
So much talent in that squad that isn't being harnessed in the right way, almost criminal that!
Three or four weeks ago GS was on the radar for the ManU job. Imagine. We oldies have lived through this time after time, as talented players from various this or that generations with or without WAGS etc, have stunk the place out as if they'd never met, with dreary co-commentary from disappointed ex-internationals with their own untold tales of dismal failure. Thanks to the staff of Bexhill's Ruddy Duck for the Blue Moon on tap which dulled the ache a little. Looking forward to the return of the SCFL next month frankly.