BOSS HIT THE BULLSEYE BY LOOKING BEYOND ELITE
IF ENGLAND’S manager at this World Cup had been foreign, would Harry Maguire have been the centre half? It is hard to imagine it. When Sven goran Eriksson took the job, he was asked the identity of Sunderland’s left back. He did not know, despite it being Michael gray, an England squad regular at the time.
Idiots derided this as a trick question or, even more stupidly, a racist one — but it was neither. It was a genuine attempt to discover what the new England manager knew of English football below the obvious. The answer: not a lot.
Eriksson reached quarter-finals with a squad that was capable of delivering more, and it is ironic he is historically derided for favouring stellar names — because that is exactly what the ‘racist’ Michael gray question exposed. Eriksson would have known who was left back at Manchester United or Arsenal, because they were England’s elite clubs. Sunderland, not so much. And if another expensive import had been in charge now, do you think he would have plumped for Maguire, while rejecting the claims of the centre halves at Manchester United and Chelsea?
One of them, Chris Smalling, isn’t even here. When Southgate made that call, Smalling’s reaction was telling. ‘You don’t play for one of the biggest clubs in the world for as long as I have, winning every trophy bar the Champions League without being able to do everything a top defender needs to do,’ he sniffed. Yet Southgate wanted his defenders to be comfortable on the ball, and thought a fellow at Leicester was better. Immersed in English football — having played for England via Crystal Palace, Aston Villa and Middlesbrough — Southgate knew there was a world beyond the elite.
For a manager new to the English game the big names are a form of shorthand — if he gets in United’s team, he must be good — but it is more complex than that. The foreign manager is often depicted as a pair of fresh eyes on England, but Southgate has proved more innovative than either Eriksson or Fabio Capello.
And if Sunderland had a good left back, he would know him, too.