Can we please now stop the World Cup hype?
At 4.18pm on December 1, on BBC 2, presenter Mark Chapman was heard to say: “Now here’s England’s route to the World Cup Final.”
Gareth Southgate’s team had been drawn with Belgium, Tunisia and Panama in Group G and the inevitable hype began. Couldn’t be easier, could it? Thank goodness, then, for the more measured reaction from the man who really matters.
Whether it was the “Dream Group” it turned out to be, the “Group of Death” or “Group of Lots of Travelling,” the England manager was never going to be jumping for joy or making cut-throat gestures.
Southgate embodies the Kipling sentiment about keeping your head when all around are losing theirs.
We’re going to need all that levelheadedness during the countdown to next June when other voices are making wild claims about his team’s prospects.
He’s a pragmatist, and for him the draw was a set of logistical problems which must be solved before he can think of how to set his team up against one very difficult opponent, and two he should beat.
And, conscientious man that he is, he would have already had all the 24 potential itineraries mapped out in his head before he sat in the State Kremlin Palace to watch the game of Russian roulette being played out on stage.
Only when he and his backroom team have studied the impact of travelling distances, temperature changes and kick-off times will he give consideration to the tactical stuff.
Southgate, though, has taken one considerable gamble in his meticulous planning by electing to base his players in Repino on the Gulf of Finland, around 45 minutes from St Petersburg.
He struck lucky in the draw because matches in Volograd, Nizhny Novgorod and Kaliningrad mean a relatively modest 4000 miles of travelling during the group stages.
However, his choice of headquarters echoes Fabio Capello’s disastrous South Africa 2010 “boot camp” in isolated Rustenburg, when England’s so-called Golden Generation went stir crazy with boredom.
That led to Roy Hodgson doing the polar opposite and basing his squad in central Krakow for Euro 2012, the Copacabana Beach for the last World Cup and a Chantilly chateau for Euro 2016.
None of those worked either, so Southgate has executed another U-turn in the hope that his younger, less worldly-wise group will buy into his own view that tournament football is not a holiday.
The Under-20s won their World Cup in South Korea and the Under-17s won theirs in India.
So there’s nothing in their DNA to prevent English players coping with tournament football.
There’s no question the draw’s been kind. But let’s just go easy on the hype, Mr Chapman.