Big match special,
Gareth Southgate has been able to convince England’s players, press and public that he has a plan worth following, writes Paul Hayward in Samara
From crisis management when he took over, Gareth Southgate has marched on to become England’s leader in a World Cup quarter-final and a cult figure back home. As the sun bounced off the Samara Arena, and the masses in England prepared for a truly national spectating experience, Southgate laid out his vision for change in the country’s football culture.
Oh, and he thought about ways to beat Sweden, less glamorous but highly structured European opponents who are among those who have held up a mirror to English underachievement.
The England manager is being feted for his modesty, intelligence and calm: qualities that have, believe it or not, generated calls for his immediate elevation to some of the highest offices in the land. So Southgate was bound to take exception to any depiction of England as flash.
He spoke of the influence his players will be having on youngsters in the areas from which they come. “They can give hope to them,” Southgate said. “We’re not a team where we just turn up, we’re waltzing around and we’ve got an entitlement. We’re lads who have come from Barnsley and Leeds and Bolton and Blackburn.
“That’s so important for us on Saturday because I always think Sweden like to point out that we’re paid this and that, and we’re the team of entitlement, when I don’t think that’s the case for this group. It’s important we remember Steve [Holland, his No 2] was at Crewe, I was at Palace when they weren’t quite as good as they are now. We’ve scrapped and fought our way.
“Most of our boys have played in the Championship or lower, whether they started there or played on loan. They are really important messages for us. We’re having success because we’re really grafting for each other, we’re playing some good football, but we’re really working without the ball. No passengers, nobody failing to close down, nobody strolling around. That’s the bedrock of why we’re getting some decent results, and we have to continue doing that.”
This is pure Southgate, stripping away vanity and historical baggage to extol a new vision of England where international football is the pinnacle and all the age-group teams are united in a single selfless culture. News of the praise being lavished on him has filtered back to Russia, where he is grateful but also wary, because he knows how veneration tends to end.
The English, it seems, want a lot more Mr Nice Guy. “Most of my career I’ve been killed for that, haven’t I?” Southgate responds. “No, I always think it’s dangerous for a start. Because I’ve got a lot of faults and I have done plenty of things wrong. It’s obviously a nice moment, but it’s probably a good thing that we’re away. I know there was a big thing made of me going up to the Colombia players after the game [to console them] – but for me that’s natural. You’ve been in a battle with another team and there’s huge respect for the fact that they’ve pushed us all the way.”
England’s transformation is in its infancy, with narrow wins over Tunisia and Colombia, a thumping of Panama and a defeat to Belgium. Yet, on the eve of England’s first World Cup quarter-final for 12 years, Southgate has been portrayed as an exponent for values not previously emphasised in English football – and, many would argue, endangered in English life. “I’m bloody proud of being English,” he says. “Football’s got a great ability to unite people and really bring positivity in moments like this.”
That positivity is fragile, and would take a buffeting if Sweden win in Samara, but there is a feel of permanence to Southgate’s ideas, even if there is a “shelf life” to all manifestos, to use his description. He says: “In international football that can be one match, because the differences and the margins are so fine. If we don’t get over the line the other night [against Colombia], then we’ve beaten Tunisia and Panama and we haven’t won a knock-out game.
“Yeah, there’s progress – and maybe [we’ll] take it forward and see how it goes. But I don’t know how long that period will be. Other people will decide that. I’ll know there’ll be a feeling of – everyone’s had enough, time for a new voice, time for a new approach.”
If this sounds rueful, Southgate is anything but downbeat. He has convinced these England players he has a plan worth following and persuaded them to re-engage with press and public, who now seem to think him capable of running the country and leading the Brexit negotiations.
Sir Bobby Robson was the last England manager to reach a World Cup semi-final and Southgate has tender memories of time they spent together.
“He came to Middlesbrough [where Southgate was manager] to talk to me and give me support, really. It was very special because he recognised the difficulties of being a young manager. He was an absolute gent.”
Robson’s England lost to West Germany on penalties in the last four at Italia 90 and finished fourth. “He was an exceptional man,” said Southgate. “We’re very close to that [reaching a semi], but we’re also a million miles away and we, of course, want to take the country there if at all possible.”
Always helpful with his answers, always thoughtful, he winces slightly, but tries to wrestle with the national figure role being pressed on him so prematurely: “I think from the off I’ve recognised that, as England manager, there’s a consequence of everything you say. It will carry more weight positively or negatively and so you have to be very careful. I don’t think I’m necessarily careful what I say but there is a consequence. If there are things you believe passionately about, OK, no problem to say exactly what you think. And if there are bits you’re not so clear on, or I don’t have a strong view on, there’s no point getting involved.
“I think what I’ll be doing when I get back is disappearing as quickly as I possibly can and staying out of the way of everything, whether that’s in the middle of Yorkshire somewhere or even further away. The nice thing is, I might not have to travel as far away as I would have had to if we’d had a really bad tournament.”
The Colombia win was the first big vindication of his work and killed the English albatross of penalty shoot-out defeats. Southgate says: “One of our national coaches from home said if Carlsberg did development games with the experiences of what World Cup football is about, that would be it, because pretty much everything was in there that young players would have to deal with.”
This is all a far, far cry from Sam Allardyce departing after one game in charge post-euro 2016. Southgate remembers “the night when the story on Sam broke,” and thinking: “I’m going to have to pick this up.” He continues: “I was very happy with the work I was doing with the Under-21s, trying to support the system and the long term. And I probably thought at the end of that cycle I’d go back to club football, and the next stage would be to go away and come back [to England] at some point maybe in the future, but I hadn’t thought too much about it.
“Initially, it was keeping the team on track, because I wasn’t sure how the job was going to feel. I wasn’t sure about the impact on the family, which I’m not comfortable with anyway. So, it was really about: how do we get the results we needed in Malta and Slovenia, and then time to breathe, and think about what was going to be next.”
Southgate says there was “definitely a watershed towards the end of qualification where we hadn’t played as well as we wanted to, and probably Steve and myself in particular looked long and hard.”
The shift to three at the back, passing from the rear and the deployment of two No 8s was accelerated. But the Colombia game, he says, displayed virtues other than technical or tactical prowess: “There was no more significant point to me than when we conceded, and three or four of the players talked to their team-mates, keeping things calm. Teams might think, ‘Blimey, try and go and score again straight away’, but they were – ‘No, OK, if it has to go to extra time, an extra half-hour, do the right things.”
This intelligence was apparent, he says, from the start: “We got the ball down and we played. We played from the back and in extra time we were still playing out of our box. I know at times it’s a bit like, ‘Oh my goodness!’ But actually, if as a group we want to be a top team moving forward we’ve got to be able to do that.”
The point Southgate has reached in his own career is to always do what he considers right rather than weigh the consequences and reactions. The “impossible job”, he says, is trying to please everyone: “We won the other night, but I still had a couple of emails – I’ve got to change my address, by the way – saying ‘Really good, but you should be picking this one
and that one’. So, I think, right, OK [he puffs his cheeks] – impossible to please everybody all of the time, but you’ve got to just believe that you’re making decisions for the right reasons.
“Of course, I take the advice of all of my staff because I’ve got real experts in every field, and it’s a really strong team. Their input and advice is really vital to what we’re doing but to a degree you have to shut yourself off from external noise and opinion, only because I know how we want to play and the types of players that would have fitted into that.
“I could have easily got distracted, influenced and affected by, ‘Oh, if I make that decision that’s not going to be popular’, or it’s going to open us up to criticism, like the changes against Belgium.
“I suppose deep down I’ve always held those beliefs, and held my own values, but not been confident enough to impose them. Certainly, I compromised a lot of that when I was with Middlesbrough, I wasn’t confident enough that was the right thing to do to get the results. You don’t have evidence it works until you’ve achieved results, and then going through relegation and the problems that causes is a reminder – hang on a second, there are things there I don’t truly believe in.
“Then when you work with young players it’s easy to go back to what your values are, because you’ve got to be… not parenting, but there’s an element of coaching that is setting standards, and with young players it’s particularly important.”
A defender in his own career, Southgate holds romantic memories of the best of World Cup football, from the classic Admiral England shirt he owned as a boy: “The 1982 World Cup was the first one where I had the wallchart, plotting every game; and in those days watching Brazil was an even bigger thing because you never saw those players in Europe. To see Zico, Eder, Socrates: I remember being devastated when they were knocked out against Italy.”
One legacy he can already set in stone is to show a generation of England players how intoxicating tournament football can be. He says: “I guess until you’ve experienced that real positivity, they [the players] maybe associated playing for England with great pride, because they know it’s the pinnacle – even lads at a lot of the bigger clubs talk about the level of training, they recognise it’s the notch up. Quite often [though] they hear that the Champions League is the best competition, the best quality football, and the teams in the Champions League have more fluency and cohesion because they’re playing together more regularly, but that doesn’t mean the level of the players is higher.
“So my belief was always that the desire for the national team was there; it’s almost like we’ve had so much pain we want to push it to one side and not admit it. You put things down because you don’t want to get hurt. So what’s nice at the moment is there’s enjoyment – and also a reality that this isn’t a finished team, we believe we can go on, but there are no guarantees with that, and I think that’s where most people are with it. Of course, as we build, managing expectations
is getting a little bit more difficult. We’ve got 25 million people [watching] and we’re two games away from a World Cup final.”
Watching him manage all this – the team here and the emotional swell back home – you hope the breakthrough he has made lasts way beyond 90 or 120 minutes against Sweden.