LET’S GET HAPPY!

Southgate targets knockout stages as he vows that this England team will not be burdened by past failures

AT the end of Gareth Southgate’s press conference at Nizhny Novgorod Stadium yesterday, a Chinese reporter asked a question. He told the England manager that in his country, English football was called happy football. Hastily, he pointed out that this was not a compliment. He said that, down the years, it was because England’s players sometimes did ridiculous things. He mentioned Raheem Sterling’s miss in Volgograd. He asked if England’s players were anxious.

Southgate looked at him askance and smiled. A little of the madness that the World Cup can generate has swirled around the England camp in the last week. Southgate grinned again when he acknowledged he had played his part, dislocating his shoulder on a run on the beach near England’s Repino base. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal the bruise on his elbow. He is not wearing his sling any more, though. ‘I wasn’t prepared to wear that in public,’ he said.

Then there was the fuss over the pictures of an England teamsheet. Even Southgate was taken aback by the outbreak of outrage, led by a few ex-players, because photos of names on a sheet of paper that may or may not have been Southgate’s selection for today’s match against Panama had been published in newspapers. Southgate has been around long enough to know the madness is coming and he is also smart enough to know how to defuse it.

So he answered the question from the Chinese journalist with good humour. ‘I’m one of the most guilty people of the happy football experience,’ he said, referring, presumably, to his penalty miss at Euro 96. ‘We have had decades of those incidents. But history is not the important thing for this team. They have an opportunity to create their own history. I’m intrigued to find out how far they can go and how well they can play. I hope we give you a different sort of happy football over the next few weeks.’ Harry Kane’s late winner against Tunisia last week has made it a happy, relaxed six days for the England team, a time they and England supporters have been able to spend contemplating, for once, a relatively serene progression to the last 16 and qualifying with a game to spare. That, of course, is to take victory over Panama for granted.

The players will not do that but even though the match will be played in the fierce heat of mid- afternoon, there is such confidence in the England squad at the moment, it is hard to see them slipping up today in what will be their second match in succession at a stadium on the banks of the Volga. Dele Alli will be absent as he recovers from a thigh injury, Ruben Loftus-Cheek is expected to deputise for him and it will be a tight call whether Raheem Sterling or Marcus Rashford starts. It is a good dilemma for Southgate to have.

If England win, it will only be the third time after 1982 and 2006 that they have won their opening two matches at a World Cup. A lack of expectation has been their friend so far but soon excitement will start to grow. If England can build some momentum, if the draw opens up, it will not be long before we are all getting ahead of ourselves.

‘It would be exciting to be the third team to achieve two opening wins,’ Southgate said. ‘Tomorrow is an opportunity, foremost, for us to qualify from the group. That has been our first objective from the off. It goes back to what I’ve always said to the lads, which is that sometimes there’s a perception that we’ve always been hugely successful but when you dig deeper our history is a bit different. So we shouldn’t be burdened by a feeling we have to live up to expectations.

‘Let’s go for things and see how good we could be. Are we better than I thought we could be? Well, less so over the last few weeks but when I go back to November and all the number of new players who have bedded in and the change of the system, there were a lot of those things happening.

‘Then look at the end of the season with the Champions League final and the experience some players gained before coming here. Jordan Henderson was part of a side that played one of the top teams in the world and pushed them all the way. So we have come here feeling really good about things.’

Southgate also stressed the importance of managing the players’ time and keeping them occupied. They visited the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg last week and Southgate talked about the pressures of being away from home, the loneliness that can creep in, the disruption that can be caused by not having family members to confide in and the danger of boredom. Cabin fever up country at Repino is something he is keen to avoid.

‘ It’s a real danger for us as a team,’ he said, ‘and I’ve got to make sure we keep getting the lads out of the hotel. They need to get their time with their families, get some broader perspective on things because we could get really insular on things like the teamsheet and get defensive.

‘The danger is you lose that little bit of life perspective. At your club you go home to your family and cuddle your kids, and you miss all of those other bits. So, I’ve got to keep getting people out in the fresh air and down to the less dangerous parts of the beach where you can’t hurt yourself and just keep it an

environment where we’re relaxed and having fun because the players are responding well to that.’

Southgate did not go into details of the side he will pick today, other than to say that Alli would not be in it because he thought it might be viewed as disrespectful to Panama, who lost their opening game to Belgium, if he did. But he did accept that managing players who are either dropped or fail to force their way into the team will be a key component in England’s progress.

‘I think it’s huge,’ he said. ‘More than anything I think for the guys who aren’t in the team tomorrow or who haven’t been in the team for either game. I’ve been in that role and know how difficult it is. There’s no doubt the further we go the more carefully that dynamic needs to be handled. And I think it’s key to teams doing well at tournaments.’

Southgate was also keen to clarify the comments he had made earlier in the week suggesting he thought the English media had a duty to ‘ help’ the team. It is typical of Southgate that he felt concerned journalists had taken a hammering on social media because of them. He pointed out that he knew what it was like to be on the wrong end of that kind of abuse and worse.

‘I totally understand the media have a role to report the news,’ he said. ‘My only observation, which I probably haven’t worded properly, is that it’s definitely an advantage for us or the opposition if you know the tactics of the other team. But I don’t expect the media to be supporters of us in terms of the way they work. They’re here to work. I know they want us to do well. That’s been clear throughout.

‘I’m relaxed. Last week, the team came out three days before the game, and I said nothing about it. I understand it’s something we can’t control and it’s part of being in a tournament and being a big team. There’s no drama about it, the picture the other day wasn’t even the team, so even less of a drama.

‘ Nothing t hat happens or is released changes the way we want to work with our media. We haven’t been open because we expect something in return. We feel it’s a better experience for everybody. We feel the players are getting their stories and messages to the supporters, and the whole environment has been really positive.

‘After you’ve been away a while, you’re a little bit sick of certain people and less so with others. That social dynamic is probably a fascinating social study for us to compare notes at the end. My only point is if the opposition have your team in any sport, that’s a competitive advantage, but it’s not the job of the media to protect that. I accept that completely.’

And so the melodramas that are an inevitable part of the World Cup drifted away and only today’s game remained. That, and the hope that England will lend a new meaning to their brand of happy football in the days and weeks that lie ahead.