Lesson for Southgate from the pride of the Lions
Excitement with which the rugby players greeted their jersey needs to be replicated in football teams, says Jim White
As sporting moments go, Nuala Walsh was gifted a rare privilege last week. The global head of marketing and client relations at Standard Life Investments, the backers of the British and Irish Lions, explained at the Telegraph Business of Sport Conference that she had been invited to see the members of the 41-man squad being introduced to the shirt for the New Zealand tour.
Given that her company has paid rather a significant sum to have its logo imprinted across the kit, it might seem only fair she was there. But even so, she said she was amazed by the response of the players.
The excitement was extraordinary; no eight-year-old tearing off the wrapping paper on Christmas Day could have matched their joy, she claimed. For them, being in possession for the first time of the shirt was not so much a rite of passage as a spiritual awakening. This was the very moment they felt they had been elevated into the inner sanctum. The pity was Walsh was one of the few able to observe the occasion. How illuminating it would have been for Gareth Southgate to be there. What the England football manager could have learnt. Though it might have been chastening: here was concrete evidence of how far he has to travel.
For, make no mistake, the white England football top has developed over recent years roughly the opposite weight of meaning to the Lions jersey. For too many, the shirt is less a glorious privilege, more a wearisome burden.
When they pulled it on in last summer’s Euros, several looked as if they had just been caught by the paparazzi leaving a nightclub in the early hours accompanied by a bleary-eyed reality TV contestant.
Instead of the pinnacle of their professional life, they looked as if they were doing it because their agent had said it would be good for their commercial prospects.
There are some who might suggest that the veneration of team wear in rugby has got a little overblown. The All Blacks began it with their insistence that no shirt ever touch the floor of the changing room. Now the Lions have mythologised theirs.
And, yet, as a rallying point, a visual summation of expectation, a shorthand explanation of meaning, shirt worship is brilliantly effective.
When the Lions players hauled their kit out of its packaging, it located them precisely in the team’s history and purpose. It was the start of a bonding process which will ensure that if they fail in New Zealand this summer, it will not be for lack of passion for the cause.
Which is why, as a methodology, it might have something for the England football manager. A canny coach, Southgate will already have appreciated that there can be no suggestion that his players are deficient in ability and technique. He is only too aware that it is the psychology around the England team that has held them back. How he reverses that will define his time.
He has already instituted a process by which former heroes present a new player with his first cap. Now he needs to take things further, to ensure that pulling on the shirt once more marks the fulfilment of individual ambition. For sure, such an approach requires the players to buy into it: it has to be genuine if it is to have any meaning. But if he can make our footballers feel remotely as passionate as the Lions do about the institution they represent, then half his battle will be won.
The white England top has developed the opposite weight of meaning to Lions jersey