SOUTHGATE ‘SURPRISE’ for England as he races to rediscover his secret weapon
Coach has just 24 hours to reignite spirit of 2021 and to fuel squad’s World Cup fever
THEY have camped with the Royal Marines on Woodbury Common, they have sat round a virtual camp fire and shared their most vulnerable life moments and they have had mood experts in to transform St George’s Park to get the England team mentally right for the Euros in 2021.
Yet now, for this England team, whose biggest asset seems to be a team spirit painfully missing from more golden generations, there isn’t the luxury of time to build the camaraderie which has been such a vital component of their relative successes.
Gareth Southgate has 24 hours to reignite the spirit of 2018 and 2021 before England fly off to the Souq Al Wakra Hotel, overlooking the Persian Gulf. The team staff have one day to get the players into the mindset that, potentially, they are approaching the most significant four weeks of their professional lives.
Tomorrow Southgate will attempt to condense a motivational and messaging programme, which would usually be drip fed over a fortnight, into a day. He isn’t letting on what the players have in store — the surprise element is crucial for it to be effective — and yet, if Southgate’s interventions in the past are a guide, you can guarantee it will make an impact.
Wales have famously had actor Michael Sheen in to deliver a rousing speech to stir their Celtic souls at September’s international meetup. ‘Maybe we can go one better than Wales,’ teased Southgate.
Sir Kenneth Branagh doing Henry V is out, as he’s from Belfast, so maybe they need Daniel Craig to convey the sense that they are His Majesty’s Secret Service or Idris Elba to channel the inspiration he brought to playing Nelson Mandela. If all else fails, there’s always Ricky Tomlinson to reprise Mike Bassett: England Manager with his mostinspirational line: ‘England will be playing Four four f ****** two!’
‘We’re just really conscious of that transition,’ said Southgate. ‘They’ve been heads down [focusing on the Premier League] and we’ve tried to let them get on with it. Even this week I’ve had to make my calls so I don’t affect club fixtures as much as possible. I know there will be players waiting for information, we’ve tried to be respectful, keep our distance. But they will get a chance to download and decompress for one day.
‘We want them to do all the things that going to a World Cup involves. the suits, the photos. Thankfully there’s been no record, or song. But we just want them to be excited about going.
‘We want to fuel that. The first couple of days we won’t be on the training pitch, bar a couple that will need to do something. We just want them to transition from a hectic club schedule to thinking about England. We want to talk to them about the fact that this, whatever happens over the next four weeks, has been the second best period for English football. We can make it the best.’
Judging by their performances singing that national anthem, which were clearly audible when there were no crowds during the pandemic, Southgate is probably right that we should be thankful there is no song for this squad but his players do have to get excited about this World Cup and that will be harder than usual. It isn’t just the timing: this is a World Cup awarded by corrupt FIFA officials built on the backs of migrant labour deaths and a chorus of Sweet Caroline isn’t going to change that narrative.
But Southgate will consult widely, from psychologists to fellow coaches in cricket, rugby and Olympic sport and will have spent a lot of time getting the mental prompts just right. Even now an advance team are preparing the rooms at the Souq Al Wakra Hotel and in the past this has include hand-written messages from Southgate to greet each member of the team — from Harry Kane to the video technician — and ensuring that photos of their families are placed around the rooms to mimic a homely feel.
Many of Southgate’s critics deride this kind of touchy-feely stuff. You suspect they see it as the thin edge of the woke wedge, seeing as many of his detractors, led by disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, wanted to turn fans against the team and stoke a culture war around players taking the knee at Euro 2020.
Yet cold analysis shows that this team bonding is actually Southgate’s secret weapon. There is a myth circulating that Southgate is somehow holding back a uniquely talented bunch of players. Understandably, it circulates widely among a younger generation, brought up on the dismal England team from 2008-2018.
Yet for those with longer memories, this isn’t even the best collection of players this century. Jamie Carragher has put this most succinctly. ‘Southgate hasn’t failed to get the most out of a talented squad,’ he said.
‘He has over-performed with a very good bunch. The suggestion that this is the greatest England team since 1966 is a myth, but the more it gains traction the more Southgate must deal with unrealistic demands. If England go beyond
the quarter-finals in Qatar they will have exceeded expectations once again, yet the idea is taking hold that the logical next step is to win a final.’
Carragher has amplified his point by asking which of the current team would get into the peak Golden Generation team? That team was David James, Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry, Ashley Cole, David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Joe Cole, Wayne Rooney and Michael Owen. And that’s ignoring Paul Scholes, probably the most talented of that bunch, who declined to play international football after 2004.
There’s an argument that Jordan Pickford gets in, but that’s more to do with the erraticism of James, as Pickford isn’t one of England’s few world-class players. Either Kieran Trippier, Kyle Walker or Trent Alexander-Arnold would make a strong case at right-back. You could play Phil Foden on the left? Jude Bellingham might one day surpass Lampard. Maybe. If he does so, it will have been some career.
Kane over Rooney? The record books will eventually say the Tottenham man is England’s greatest goalscorer but you would have to be a bold manager to displace Rooney. If it were a 4-4-2 (obviously these days it wouldn’t be), Kane would get in ahead of the Michael Owen of 2006.
In that generation of players, though, which achieved nothing compared to what this team have done, club football dominated, a malign virus infecting the squad, from the Manchester United and Chelsea cliques at the dining tables, to the players feeling pressured to report a hamstring strain at halftime, because they feared the wrath of Jose Mourinho or Sir Alex Ferguson on their return.
Southgate, whose final international days coincided with the early days of the generation, saw all this. And he has changed it.
Harry Kane doesn’t drop out of friendlies. It was hard even to get him off in the pretty meaningless friendly against Switzerland in March — he did come off on 88 minutes — and he played 180 minutes in the largely redundant, from a strictly competitive point of view, Nations League fixtures against Italy and Germany in September.
Players actually enjoy turning up to play for England. There are genuine friendships across club boundaries.
Only once has it seemingly threatened to fracture, when Raheem Sterling squared up to Joe Gomez when the squad met up a day after a Liverpool win over Manchester City in 2019. When that happened, many observers said that Southgate would lose the respect of Sterling after he disciplined him, leaving him out of the next matchday squad, that the squad’s precious bond would be broken. Neither of those scenarios transpired.
There are tactical issues you might have with Southgate but oddly, tactics isn’t necessarily the main thing in international football. Better to have good tactics than bad, but no one would argue that the current world champion coach Didier Deschamps is the greatest mind in world football.
Nor would many have listed Joachim Low as one of the game’s foremost innovators when he was sacked by Karlsruhe after relegating the team to the regional league from the German second division after winning just one game in 18.
In the intensified atmosphere of an international tournament, where coaches have limited time to perfect systems, as they try to ensure that their team are more than the sum of their parts rather than less is a fine line.
For years, England were considerably less. Now they are more. Southgate alone engineered that when Sven-Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello failed. Now he must do it all again. In 24 hours, at St George’s Park tomorrow.