Southgate deserves better than to get booed by his fans. England have never had it this good
LIKE the LIV golfers, who are as rich as Croesus and spend most of their time complaining and launching lawsuits, pity the poor England men’s football fans who have never had it so good in major tournaments but lament their fates as if they had been banished to the bleak and forgotten hinterlands of international football.
Pity them for what Gareth Southgate has been putting them through. Pity them for having to watch as England get to the semi-finals and finals of major tournaments rather than the second rounds and quarter-finals that had been the country’s staple for more than two decades. It is a good job we do not get close to success very often, because when we taste it, we spit it in the manager’s face.
Southgate was booed, again, after the defeat by Italy in Milan 10 days ago and he would have got another salvo were it not for his side’s thrilling comeback in the 3-3 draw against Germany at Wembley on Monday that marked England’s farewell before the World Cup. He, and the team, deserve better.
England are weeks away now from departing for Qatar but we live in a land of angrily enthusiastic revisionism where getting to the last four in Russia in 2018, with a young side largely shorn of superstars, has been recast as a fluke that was achieved, not because of England’s excellence but because of the mediocrity of others.
How bleak it is that some are prepared to reshape a memory because they have come to dislike the principles a manager stands for. It is the same with Euro 2020.
England got to their first major final since 1966 but that, too, is now projected as an abject failure because the team fell at the final hurdle to those well-known football upstarts, Italy.
England did not beat anyone of note at that tournament, either. That is what we are told now. Croatia? Well, they weren’t the same team that got to the World Cup final three years earlier, were they? Germany? Yeah, well, it was the worst Germany team there’s ever been. Denmark? Come on, we always beat Denmark and they didn’t even have Christian Eriksen by that stage of the Euros.
People deny all sorts of things in this world: there are climatechange deniers, flat-earthers, smoking-as-a-cause-of-cancer deniers, wartime atrocity deniers, pandemic deniers. Usually, people want to deny bad things because denial is easier than being afraid or confused.
What is peculiar about the England men’s football narrative is that we seem to want to deny something rare that happened to our football team that was actually good. The England team had some success in 2018 and 2021. It made us happy and united for a while. The team did better than it had done before. But now a lot of people want us to believe that it never happened. In another first for the England men’s football team, we have created success-deniers.
Imagine having the first manager for two generations to get England playing like more than the sum of their parts, imagine having the first manager to somehow smooth over the club cliques and make joining up with the national team fun again, imagine having a manager who finally gets close to winning a tournament again. And imagine hating him for it.
While we’re at it, imagine having a centre-half who was one of the mainstays of the runs at those two tournaments and then imagine booing his name when it’s read out before kick-off because he’s going through a bad spell with his club.
And then imagine being surprised when he plays like a cat on hot bricks against Germany last Monday and makes some mistakes. Maybe he will play better if his own fans didn’t slaughter him. And so for the first time since the happy hiatus of harmony that caught us all unawares in 2018, the England men’s football team will travel to a major tournament in a few weeks time, having reverted to the norm: led by a manager under pressure, knowing fans are waiting, in some cases hoping, for him to fail.
The danger with that kind of atmosphere, of course, is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The players play with pressure again because of the antipathy towards them. The shirt hangs heavy again.
There are legitimate football reasons to criticise Southgate. His team selections sometimes appear cautious and there are many, myself included, who find it hard to accept that, whatever his defensive limitations, England cannot find a way of including in the first XI a player as talented as Trent Alexander-Arnold, who has been marginalised by the manager.
OTHERS say that Southgate can be slow to react to in-game developments and that he has, on occasion, been out-manoeuvred by rival managers. Then again, a tactical powerhouse like Fabio Capello had better players than Southgate and couldn’t get England beyond the second round at the 2010 World Cup. Managing the England team is about a whole collection of attributes, not just one.
There is no point pretending England are in good form. But neither should we overestimate the importance of the glorified friendlies that are the Nations League fixtures. There are reasons for optimism, too, most notably the maturing of the impressive Jude Bellingham and the return to club form of Marcus Rashford.
It is the right of the fans to boo and jeer the man who turned England into a force in international football again. For the rest of us, it is our right to remember tournaments like the 2010 World Cup (Algeria in Cape Town anyone?) and the 2014 World Cup (knocked out in seven days) and think that, after the changes he has wrought, Southgate deserves better than to be booed by his own fans as he leads England to Qatar.