VERY HUMBLE HERO
Gareth Southgate was reviled for missing a crucial penalty — but, argues DOMINIC SANDBROOK, the lessons he learned in adversity inspired him to become ...
DARKNESS had fallen when Gareth Southgate stepped up to take the kick that changed his life. It was the evening of June 26, 1996, and the semi-final of Euro 96 had gone to penalties.
After 120 gripping minutes, England and Germany had scored five penalties each. The shoot- out had reached sudden death. England were looking for volunteers. And Southgate, 25, an inexperienced defender with a handful of caps, raised his hand.
I remember exactly where I was when he began that lonely walk towards the penalty spot. I was home from university, and in a disastrous miscalculation, I had allowed my friend Mike to persuade me the ideal place to watch the match was the Yates’s Wine Lodge in Wolverhampton, not far from the home ground of our beloved team, Wolves.
The place was packed, the atmosphere feverish. A good proportion of the men crammed inside took their tops off. Some of them started singing songs about the IRA ( then a lamentably popular chant for England’s fans.)
When Southgate’s penalty thudded weakly into the German goalkeeper, one man literally launched himself at the big screen. Stools began flying around the bar.
On the screen, or what was left of it, a distraught Southgate was being consoled by England’s manager, Terry Venables. In the bar, crushing disappointment had given way to chaotic violence. As we made our escape, the police were pushing their way in.
It was an awful evening. In central London, thousands of hooligans clashed with police in Trafalgar Square; in Brighton, a Russian teenager was stabbed five times by yobs who thought he was German.
Almost everything about that night seemed to sum up what was wrong with English football, from the shattered hopes on the field to the posturing aggression off it.
And at the centre of it all was poor Southgate, a loser for the ages. Never mind that as a player, he went to two World Cups with England, and as a manager, guided modest Middlesbrough to 12th in the Premier League. He was defined by that missed penalty. ‘It may be unfair,’ said one headline six years ago, ‘but Gareth Southgate will forever remain a figure of failure among England supporters.’ Not any more.
Not after Tuesday’s heart- stopping victory over Colombia to take Southgate’s England to the World Cup quarter-finals — a win secured, in a supreme irony, in a penalty shoot- out.
With 24 million people watching back home, this smart, studious-looking man was again at the centre of a national drama. But this time, in a mirror image of those pictures in 1996, it was Southgate consoling the distraught Colombian penalty-taker. A
ND in its way, the image of Southgate embracing that sobbing player says everything about the sheer class of the man. Of course, the England manager knew better than anyone what the Colombian was going through, having missed a penalty himself. Yet it was testament to his courtesy, compassion and old-fashioned sportsmanship that even in the excitement of victory, he found time to comfort the devastated loser.
Since he was unexpectedly propelled into English football’s electric chair, Southgate hasn’t put a foot wrong. He has united England behind a young and likeable team, who seem to have shed the hubristic excesses often associated with their over-hyped predecessors.
Yet who can say they saw this coming?
When Southgate’s predecessor Sam Allardyce resigned after a newspaper investigation suggested he had offered advice on how to ‘get around’ rules on player transfers, many doubted whether Southgate was up to the job. As his father told the Mail’s David Jones a few weeks ago, the online comments were ‘appalling’, and he had to switch off the computer in disgust.
But Southgate’s critics should have known better.
From the moment he began his footballing life as a 16-year- old from Crawley with eight O-levels, he was mocked for being too nice, too polite and too middle- class. At Crystal Palace, the youth team manager told him that unless he toughened up, he had ‘no f****** chance’ of a football career, and advised him to go to university. But he never stopped trying. In this, as in so much else, he drew inspiration from his parents: Clive, a builder who rose to become an IBM factory manager, and Barbara, a former clerical worker.
As Clive later put it, they tried to give Gareth the ‘right values’, and they clearly succeeded. For not only has their son built a far better England side than anybody expected, he has done so with intelligence, composure and supreme common sense.
And for anybody who, like me, has despaired at our national team’s failures for decades, all this comes as a glorious change. It is often said that the position of England manager is an impossible job. Certainly, few jobs come with such unrelenting public pressure. And in their different ways, almost all of Southgate’s recent predecessors have become synonymous with failure.
The gold standard remains Sir Alf Ramsey, the son of an Essex labourer who took elocution lessons and led England to glory in the 1966 World Cup. But since his departure, the story has, with a few exceptions, been one of scandal and disappointment.
Don Revie deserted his country in 1977 for a lucrative job in the United Arab Emirates. Graham Taylor was reduced to ranting at a linesman as England crumbled in 1993 and failed to qualify for the World Cup.
Sven- Goran Eriksson, the first foreigner to manage England, indulged his celebrity players and suffered the indignity of seeing his philandering splashed all over the front pages. Steve McClaren huddled under a brolly as England crashed to disaster. While Fabio Capello, the vastly overpaid Italian martinet, sank without trace.
Even Roy Hodgson, an erudite and decent man, saw his team sink to a humiliating defeat by Iceland at Euro 2016. Yet just as many fans had given up on England, Southgate entered the picture. And from his three-piece suits to his quiet common sense, the transformation has been astonishing.
Nothing is left to chance — not even the dreaded penalties, with Southgate employing a female psychologist to give his players psychometric tests and help them ‘take control of the process’.
Few of the players are household names. Goalkeeper, Jordan Pickford, had spells with Darlington and Alfreton. Harry Maguire played in the third tier for Sheffield United; captain Harry Kane had spells on loan at Leyton Orient, Norwich and Millwall.
But in Southgate’s words, they have ‘a humility about them . . . They are all prepared to graft and dig in for each other. I know those are slightly old-fashioned qualities, but we don’t have the right to stroll around a football pitch. We play with character and I love that about them’.
Gone, thank goodness, is the celebrity culture that blighted the England team for so long. Gone is the circus that followed David Beckham and the grubby scandals that surrounded Wayne Rooney and John Terry. T
ODAY, the tone is set by Southgate, a family man who, in his own words, has ‘never been good at gambling, drinking, fighting, tantrums, celebrity’. He is, in fact, the kind of England manager we thought had gone, an oldfashioned, modest, even gentlemanly figure in his nowfamous waistcoat.
There are none of the deranged histrionics associated with Premier League managers such as Jose Mourinho. There are no mind games, no attacks on referees.
For the first time I can remember, England have a manager from whom our nation’s politicians ought to take leadership tips.
Of course, it might go wrong tomorrow afternoon. But even if it does, Southgate and his boys have given us a team to cheer and an ethos to admire.
And if it does go wrong, Southgate knows how to put defeat into perspective. When he missed that penalty, he was reviled.
Yet he did not buckle. ‘ I’ve learned a million things from that day and the years that followed it,’ he once said. ‘ When something goes wrong in your life, it doesn’t finish you, and you should become braver, knowing that you’ve got to go for things in life and don’t regret because you didn’t try to be as good as you might be.’ Sir Alf Ramsey would have agreed. And even if Southgate has some way to go before he matches his predecessor’s glory — well, three more games — it is a measure of his achievement that people are talking about him in the same breath.
He makes you proud to be English. When was the last time you said that about a football manager?
Mind you, I still wish he had scored that penalty.