The Southgate obsession

There’s a real problem in English football when it comes to recognising our failures. As a society, and as a country, we’ve spent years being told that England – and the United Kingdom as a whole – is one of the greatest entities in politics, sport and pretty much every other facet of life.

We’ve built entire songs and cultures around our love of the beautiful game and while that’s a great thing, it does mean we put a little bit too much emphasis on our success stories. Alas, the success stories only seem to count when a piece of silverware is involved, which is why the year 1966 is still so important in the present day.

The last couple of years have seen genuine pride being restored to the England national team for the first time, arguably, since 1990, when Bobby Robson guided the Three Lions to the semi-finals of the FIFA World Cup.

In the years since then, we’ve seen an influx of underperforming players and managers who simply were not suited to the role, with England continually failing to impress on the European and world stage.

When Gareth Southgate was brought into the fold as the nation’s new manager following the Sam Allardyce scandal, it was seen as another instance of “here we go again”. Instead, though, reports quickly began to surface that the players in the squad were beginning to build up a real team unity that was slowly but surely becoming more evident in their matches.

It wasn’t going to matter unless they put it all together on the big stage and back in 2018, they did just that by achieving England’s joint-second best result in history by getting to the semis. As if that wasn’t enough, they reached the European Championship final for the first time three years later, only to fall short at the final hurdle with Italy reigning supreme at Wembley.

Sure, tactical decisions were made that perhaps could’ve been construed as misguided, but Southgate was still able to put together a unit that was capable of going all the way in tournaments.

The World Cup in 2022 is going to be slightly different to the others given that it’ll take place in the winter, serving as a disruption to the domestic football campaign. Because of that, the recent international break was an important way of seeing where the squad was at prior to the finals.

Two defeats and two draws, including a humbling 4-0 loss to Hungary at Molineux, genuinely had some fans calling for Southgate’s head.

The short-sighted nature of football fans will never fail to shock and amaze because all you need to do is listen to the players themselves to understand just how disruptive it would be to give Southgate his marching orders right now.

“Southgate you’re the one” is ringing out at 11am and then by midday, everyone is sticking knives in the man’s back.

If his tactical decisions in Qatar aren’t up to scratch and England fall short, then you could start to make an argument that perhaps he isn’t the one to lead this incredibly talented group of players into Germany 2024.

But people, if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, this is all starting to sound a bit fickle, and there’s a superiority complex that a lot of people need to put to one side.