Rescue the national side
It is little more than seven years since Gareth Southgate was sacked by Middlesbrough with the club fourth in the Championship and fresh from victory over Derby County the previous day, which had come at the end of a run of five games that had included three straight home defeats.
The result that most likely set Southgate on the road to that odd sacking – “the most difficult decision of my life,” the chairman Steve Gibson called it – was a 5-0 home defeat to West Bromwich Albion on Sept 19, followed by losses to Leicester City and Watford. West Brom went on to promotion that season while Middlesbrough slipped to finish 11th under their new manager, who would himself resign one year later.
That new manager, who had come in, as they always do, with indecent haste, five days after Southgate’s dismissal, was Gordon Strachan, whose Scotland career may yet have been finished by England’s victory under their interim manager on Friday. A simple twist of fate, you might say, and Southgate was generous towards his opposite number on Friday night even though it was the Scot who had once replaced him.
It will be Southgate for England now, a handsome reward for a man whose one managerial sacking in the game clearly affected him deeply and caused him to re-think his whole approach to his career. In the interim he turned down a technical director’s role at the Football Association and just tried to build a coaching career, trusting that if he did well enough then the opportunity would come in the end. Southgate would doubtless himself acknowledge that in his favour was the fact he was not obliged to take the first job that came along, having been wise enough to have made himself financially secure during his playing days. The FA jobs paid well, too, and as a consequence he was never one of those more desperate candidates on the League Managers’ Association’s list of out-of-work members for whom just getting an interview would be a blessing.
Increasingly now, that list has grown so long that clubs are making offers to potential new managers that include a pay-off of just three months’ money. No one is pretending that this is on a parallel with the real-world hardships of the zero-hours contract, but it nevertheless says something profound to any new manager. These clubs are not investing in the longterm. They want results now, and if