Way ahead looks Taylor-made
How Peter laid ground for Southgate’s youth project
A CROP of youngsters thrown together in a new 3-5-2 system. A valiant performance, albeit without the desired result, against one of the world’s leading teams.
An eloquent bright young English manager able to explain his bold new vision, saying: “The only way to find out if they are up to the task is by putting them in the squad and then throwing them in the deep end. If we don’t take a chance, we’ll never know how good they are.”
We’re talking about Gareth Southgate, right?
Increasingly, though, English football seems to have meandered wastefully full circle since taking a wrong turn around the time they decided to go ‘foreign’ in their search for a manager.
Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson had already been appointed when caretaker manager Peter Taylor, formerly in charge of the Under-21 side, gave us a glimpse of an alternative future. It is one we are only just waking up to now.
Disappointment followed disappointment as the FA attempted to tap into Sir Alex Ferguson via Steve McClaren, an Italian godfather in the shape of Fabio Capello, and the collected thoughts of Europe in the memory banks of the much-travelled Roy Hodgson. But did the answer lie closer to home all that time?
Seventeen years ago tomorrow, Taylor’s only game in charge against Italy – a brave 1-0 defeat in which David Beckham wore the captain’s armband for the first time and which featured six England players still eligible for the Under-21 side – got the nation buzzing with the same cautious optimism there will be at Wembley tonight.
“It was easier for me,” recalled Taylor yesterday when he considered the parallels between his approach and that of Southgate.
“Gareth is the actual manager and his job is on the line so what he is doing is braver than what I did. I knew it was only one game so I thought I would pick a young team and go that way.
“If you go back to the names available then, you think, ‘Why did we not win a tournament?’ It is surprising and frustrating but it might mean we were short in certain areas.
“Maybe if players had been given a bit more opportunity earlier, to get a little bit more experience – like Gareth is giving them now – it would have helped them when it mattered.
“Gareth is like me; he knows the players, he has worked with them. Those other managers did not know their younger players nearly so well. It is not just picking young players, it is picking the right young players.”
Taylor rang David Seaman, Paul Ince and Tony Adams to tell them they were not required. Southgate was one of the few senior internationals to survive the cull.
Taylor’s starting XI went on to average a further 38 caps each in what were to become established international careers.
Fast forward to 2017 and England’s Under-20 captain Lewis Cook, who became the first Englishman since Bobby Moore to lift any sort of World Cup, is the latest to progress alongside junior team-mates Angus Gunn, above, and Dominic Solanke.
Taylor himself is keen to get back into the game after helping New Zealand’s All Whites to reach their intercontinental World Cup play-off against Peru this week before a brief stint as Gillingham’s director of football.
Management is a notoriously fickle environment, and for all the plaudits he is being given at the moment, Southgate also knows he is the most likely victim if the FA bottle their long-term plans after a dismal summer tournament.
Refreshingly, given the size of the egos of some of the England managers of the intervening period, the 47-year-old does not care. Like Taylor before him, his sole focus is on improving the players in this charge.
“You’ll always be judged on a tournament, but make the decisions that are right for the team,” said Southgate. “Not everybody might work that way, but the reason I came into the FA was because I care about young English players and England.
“There’s something bigger I’m working for than just getting results in the short term and my own personal ambitions. If you’re a coach your mindset has to be to help people improve. We have to inject belief into these players. “I can’t control if we have moments of pressure, how other people respond. But if you’re a manager and you worry about that, it inhibits your decisions. You can become risk averse, and there’s a danger if you’re risk averse you can forget about trying to win, and try not to lose.”
If you worry about the sack you start trying not to lose _ GARETH SOUTHGATE