NO ONE’S LAUGHING NOW...
Objects of ridicule when they crashed out to Iceland, how England turned their world around
WHEN the text message alerts beep on the England players’ phones to tell them the ice cream van is in town, the rush from the rooms to the outdoor space at St George’s Park resembles something of a stampede. It is not exactly in the Fabio Capello mould of nutritional management — famously he banned ketchup and butter from the Rustenburg training camp at the 2010 World Cup — but the ice cream van visits on site at St George’s Park have served a purpose for Gareth Southgate that goes way beyond refuelling.
Likewise, the food van that sometimes turns up with barbequed meat. And those famous unicorns the players muck around on in the swimming pool on recovery days. And the boxing ‘world title’ belts the players compete for in the gym. The basketball court, which now dominates the Hilton hotel reception area at St George’s Park, is where you would have seen Harry Kane and Kieran Trippier beating Mason Mount and Phil Foden in a two-v-two match.
‘It’s like a forest in here,’ said Mount on arrival to St George’s, so dramatically had the FA’s football centre, set in the middle of Staffordshire countryside, been transformed. It is a tranquil place, where Longhorn cattle roam the outer perimeter jogging trails.
But the forest of foliage referred to by Mount was part of Southgate’s plan to attend to the final detail of preparation as England prepared for Euro 2020. Indoor plants and trees now adorn St George’s Park, with a juice bar, bean bags and sofas where once there was business-like hotel sterility.
The real place to be is the converted ballroom, which is now a TV/cinema room. You might think that the other Euro 2020 games might be the top draw for viewing. But at 9pm every night there is an alternative, especially now the matches are few and far between.
Lined up in front of the giant screen are the massage tables. And to get the best view for the camp’s hottest ticket — Love Island — you have to book your session early.
‘You book your treatment times so you’re on your bed when Love Island comes on,’ revealed Luke
Shaw. On Thursday night, it was film night, though, with a special message live from Tom Cruise and the players getting a sneak preview of one of his forthcoming movies.
It is not just happenstance that means the players have become so attached to their base. ‘We love St George’s,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s unbelievable. It’s felt like home.’ Southgate, once part of an England squad where the tables split between Manchester United and Liverpool players, was meticulous about preparing an environment his players could relax in. Steven Gerrard once said he felt ‘hatred’ for United’s players and that ‘when you meet up for England at that time, you pretend you like them’.
This was just one of the knots Southgate had to untangle before England could function as a team. Indeed, every role Southgate has played in his professional life — England player, failed penaltytaker, sacked Middlesbrough manager, FA youth football guru, Under-21 boss — feels as though it has led to this point.
There is probably no one with better knowledge of all the nuances of the English game and better suited to refreshing the septic culture so that the infamous England curse, the ‘weight of the shirt’ as Capello described it, could be overcome.
It has been a long journey, 10 years in the making, with Southgate first appointed head of elite development by the FA in 2011. That is when a plan started to come together.
FULLY clothed, a broad grin on his face, Southgate was going for it. He took a running jump and then plunged himself into the pool. All around, the cheers of teenagers and young men filled the midnight air at Toulon in France. Jordan Pickford was there, Ben Chilwell and Jack Grealish, too.
It was May 2016 and England’s Under-21s had won the Toulon tournament. The celebration may seem a little out of character, but this was personal redemption. A year before, his side had finished bottom of their group at the Under21 European Championship in the Czech Republic.
Southgate had reached a nadir at 45, called before the FA board to account for his failure. It was a messy affair. Effectively Southgate was put on a warning. At the time, he had been responsible for managing the Under-20, Under-17 and Under-15 age-group managers. The FA board stripped him of those responsibilities. ‘He saw that as a punishment,’ said one associate close to Southgate. ‘It was dressed up as freeing him up to focus on coaching the Under-21s but he saw it for what it was.’
But the FA did also provide some outside help, assigning performance psychologist Jonny Zneimer to the Under-21 team. With degrees in sports science and sports psychology and an MA in human behaviour psychology, Zneimer has qualifications aplenty.
Initially, Southgate allowed him to observe a team meeting before an Under-21 Euro qualifier at Brighton against Switzerland in November 2015. Southgate talked to the team, explaining his goals and ambitions for the week. Players nodded when key points were raised. Polite silence. ‘You see,’ said Southgate afterwards. ‘I’m not getting much back from them.’
‘I’m not bloody surprised,’ said
Zneimer. ‘You didn’t ask a decent question.’
Zneimer removed the lines of seats and turned it into a horseshoe, every chair looking in at Southgate. There was a second meeting half an hour later. Southgate was to stand in the middle and this time he held a football. Already, this was less like school. When he asked a question, he would chuck the ball at the player to whom he had addressed it. Immediately the mood was lighter, more playful. And responses were more open.
A small lightbulb came on in Southgate’s head. It helped that in the game, England were 1-0 down on 82 minutes and won 3-1. Zneimer would be coming back. ‘Any role I played was merely that he took confidence in me endorsing what he intuitively thought was good,’ said Zneimer. ‘Most of the work I do is
We love it at St George’s. We watch Love Island, it feels like home
trying to educate people and I think Gareth is a natural educator, even though he’s not trained in it.’ In subsequent sessions, Southgate began to open up to the players about his own failures, including that penalty miss in 1996. He was not convinced this was the correct approach. For one thing, vulnerability is an unwelcome interloper in the average dressing room. Secondly, he is more of an introvert than a heart-on-his-sleeve guy.
But Southgate shared it all: rejection as a youngster at Southampton, coming through at Crystal Palace, missing the penalty for England, being sacked at Middlesbrough. Zneimer says you could feel the shift in the room. ‘There was a dramatic sense of engagement with players in a different way. He had moved away from being mentor to being on their level. It creates a different kind of bond.’ Four weeks after Southgate’s win in Toulon, just 90 miles down the road in Nice, the England senior team lost 2-1 to Iceland in the last 16 of Euro 2016. It is easy to forget, as the nation contemplates England being crowned European champions today, that it is just five years ago that the team was a laughing stock, beaten by a nation of 356,000 people. The performance was so bad that it looked like a collective nervous breakdown.
Manager Roy Hodgson resigned and with no obvious successor the FA were, once again, in a hole. When Greg Dyke suggested Southgate could hold the fort while they search for a serious manager, Southgate, irritated, makes it clear he is not interested.
So the job went to Sam Allardyce, who, amid a farcical and concocted scandal, lasted 67 days. By then Southgate had a rethink. Dyke had left the FA; his country needed him, which appealed to the sense of duty in the grandson of a Royal Marine; and his whole schtick to his players was that they should seize their opportunities.
SOUTHGATE is big on visual messaging. So at St George’s Park there are many motivational posters to inspire the players. But when he first took over, initially as caretaker manager in autumn 2016, Adam Lallana recalled the visual prompts were not quite as positive.
‘On the walls of a room, information was plastered everywhere,’ wrote Lallana. ‘Data pointing out England had only won one knockout game at a major tournament in almost 16 years [against Ecuador in 2006].
‘The truth on how England had fallen short was pinned up for all the squad to see. It was a clever way of stripping everything back to reality. [As a football nation] we were miles off. Gareth then spoke and said: “What have we got to lose?” We weren’t the players who had that legacy so why should we be weighed down by it.’
Southgate then showed them a film of the disgraced GB Olympic team in 1996, where only one gold medal was won, and contrasted it with the scenes on the team’s return from Rio in 2016, where 27 gold medals were won. Nothing was set in stone, was Southgate’s message.
Every time you hear an England player talking about ‘writing their own history’ in an interview, it is the embodiment of a seed planted in their minds five years ago.
Southgate shared his penalty miss story with the senior team. His experience with the Under-21s had encouraged him to believe this could be vital for easing the psychological burden. It was a way of telling them that he had been though the worst you could experience professionally and survived.
Once again, it created a shift in the dynamic. Players would get together in small groups to discuss issues in their lives.
Raheem Sterling, who two years later would share publicly about the violent death of his father when he was just two years old, was one of the first to embrace the approach. Others followed. This disparate group of Premier League stars was beginning to look like a team.
But the rise of the national team has not be a linear path of progression. Team unity, so patiently constructed, was almost shattered in November 2019 when, unprovoked and over dinner, Manchester City’s Sterling rounded on Liverpool’s Joe Gomez at a squad meet up the day after City had lost to Liverpool.
‘When any leader is trying to develop a culture you need a consistency,’ said Steve Holland, his assistant, last week. ‘So when you’re talking to the players about behaviour and standards then, OK, one of the big players does something that doesn’t fit into that, what are you going to do?’
Sterling was suspended for a game and came straight back for the next one. For some, that was pandering to the star. For others, it was an unnecessarily humiliating punishment which meant he would lose Sterling as an ally. After that farrago, Southgate would not see the squad for another 10 months due to the pandemic. When he did, Phil Foden and Mason Greenwood were sent home for breaching lockdown restrictions.
‘In every area he reflected on what is the best-case scenario to try to create the best culture across all the areas to help the team win,’ said Holland. ‘We have some talented players but England have had talented players before. What perhaps had happened was the scars certain groups of players had through their experiences had started to define the culture.
‘With a fairly new group of players emerging … they’re not tainted by issues of the past so have got the chance to form a new way of thinking. “What is possible here?” rather than “What have we got to do to avoid being criticised?”’
There are little cameos spread across the last four weeks which reflect how Southgate’s vision is manifesting itself. Jordan Henderson, smile as broad as the Wear estuary, was leaving the Olympic Stadium in Rome last week, with Jadon Sancho giggling behind him.
Henderson had just scored his first England goal in his 62nd game while Sancho had made his first start in this tournament. ‘What are you laughing at?’ said Henderson, before grabbing Sancho in a playful headlock. At the start of the tournament, when Sancho, upset at not getting close to the starting XI, had been disappearing to his room after training, it was Henderson who took him aside and challenged him to boxing contests in the gym.
The ‘tribal elders’, as Southgate refers to the core group who have
We created a culture. These young players aren’t scarred by the past
been with him for five years, know their role. Then there is John Stones running around in circles in delirium on the training ground, celebrating nutmegging Harry Maguire. Maguire, eyes rolling, looks like an annoyed older brother, tolerating this behaviour. But the camaraderie between the Manchester City and Manchester United centre-halves is clear. No separate tables here.
On Wednesday night after victory against Denmark, we saw a rare side of the reserved, measured Southgate. As he applauded the fans and as the players gathered to join in the communal singing of ‘Sweet Caroline’, Southgate fist-pumped towards the crowd, who roared their appreciation. Southgate shouted in triumph and punched the air.
Meanwhile, his excited players assembled on the touchline, bouncing up and down joyfully, as they joined fans bellowing out a Neil Diamond track from 1969, almost as old as England’s last trophy.
Southgate surely feels that his work here is nearly done. Previously, good times never felt this good. Many were inclined to believe that, when it came to England, they never would.