Whipping boy Gareth Southgate deserves kudos for just getting this far
They have a word for it in German: der Briefcasetrainerparadigm, a phrase used to describe a person who is self-evidently good at what they do, but who is still universally regarded as a disaster.
Okay, there is no such actual word. The phrase “there’s a German word for it” is in itself a long-standing red flag, what the Germans call a Fake-Deutsche-Langeswort-Intro. But the concept of how exactly to define or put a scale on success feels very current as Gareth Southgate prepares his team to face Switzerland on Saturday evening in Düsseldorf.
This will be a fourth straight quarter-final for a manager who is now always one game from a likely end point and who is also approaching the ultimate expression of his own peculiar dynamic — what we might call the Southgate paradox.
It went under the radar in the chaos of last weekend’s victory against Slovakia in Gelsenkirchen. But here is a fact many people will find deeply annoying, even impossible, but which remains demonstrably true. Whatever happens against Switzerland, Southgate is the most consistently successful manager England have ever had. Arguably, on results, Southgate is the greatest.
Wait! Come back. No one is claiming England have been anything but dreadful at these Euros. The manager’s selections have been a mess. Proper opponents will rip them apart playing like this. Maybe England are simply building towards a definitive thrashing, a Brazil-Germany at the Maracanã, a Watford in the Cup final horror show.
But the wider fact remains that Southgate’s England have reeled off two quarter-finals, a semi-final and a final. In six years his England team have won seven tournament knockout games. Pre-Southgate England had won six knockout games in half a century. This is the most sustained period of success in the history of the men’s England football team.
Gareth Southgate has created an environment in which his players could flourish. Photograph: Eddie Keogh/FA via Getty Images
It tells you what a fundamentally strange job being England manager is, how vital the culture and leadership stuff is. Southgate is very good at this. He manages the submerged iceberg of weirdness outside the match days so well we forget it is even there. This, plus a good crop of players, has been enough to get further than anyone else outside 1966.
It is, of course, necessary to run down the arguments against. It will be said Southgate simply has the greatest players, that England’s talent is the envy of the world, that he has been holding back these golden lions all this time. Brazil gazes at Conor Gallagher in awe. France crave their own Jordan Henderson. the Netherlands can only wish they had a Jesse Lingard.
This might make sense if you have no knowledge of other nations, or have swallowed whole the Premier League marketing plan. The reality is England have always had good players. Southgate created an environment in which they could flourish and did this while taking Ashley Young, Eric Dier and Harry Maguire along for the ride. This is what good management looks like.
So instead we will hear that Southgate has simply been lucky, all the time, for eight years. But maybe, just maybe Southgate is cashing in some luck from a good solid eight years of work. England kept trying when they might have fallen apart. Something made that happen. Luck runs out. But it does not arrive in a vacuum.
It is at this point that the Southgate Paradox kicks in. You can disagree with and pick away at the above. But there is no logical sense in which Southgate’s record can be regarded as an abject failure — at least not by anyone with semi-functional powers of reasoning.
Southgate with West Ham and England striker Jarrod Bowen before a training session. Photograph: Eddie Keogh/FA via Getty Images
And yet this is what is going on out there. Right now Southgate is arguably the most rage-inducing person in the country, the object of constant unchecked derision. So profound is the hostility it may come to define Southgate’s time as England manager, which has also involved — just as a subplot — being the best manager of the past 50 years. Yay, England!
Where does it come from, this rage? The unchecked conviction that England under Southgate have been a continuing national humiliation? Most obviously, people get bored with the same faces and voices. There is a reflex to complain. Life is fragile and difficult. People need a place to rest their anger.
Plus there is the fact this has become a race to the bottom in the media. Southgate-bashing is clicks. And the media are no longer Nigel Cakebread of the Daily Week giving it to you straight every Thursday. The news cycle hits from every angle, a battle among pundits to go viral, to produce the perfectly clippable, apparently spontaneous denunciation.
This is the unusual environment Southgate is talking about. The media are people he used to play with. Hugely accessible A-listers can speak out of the air like gods direct to their followers, who will amplify these tailored opinions as “just telling it like it is” (while expertly monetising a podcast).
And there is something very distinct, very now, very England about how that floating anger expresses itself. The cry is always for an unshackling, an unleashing. The talk is always about betrayal, about a sword left sleeping in the stone. We are confined by elites, by uncaring powers, by men in suits. Unleash us. Allow us to reinstate the natural order, which is English success, English righteousness.
Southgate fits this dynamic because he is cautious and controlling. He fits it because of the way he looks, the gawky headmaster chic. Politics do not help. He will always be Woke-gate to some, even if he is really not very woke any more. Southgate talks in words. He does not roar. He does not surge or unleash. He reads the meter and takes the recycling out.
And in many ways, he is trapped, unable to do anything but stay the course. In part, these constraints are his own limitations. The calls to unleash, to attack, to let loose the dogs of Gareth have coincided with a degree of confusion this tournament. Unbalanced selections have emerged. Here is a manager who has forgotten he is not good at the unleashing side, who has moved away from the steadiness that made his team work.
But there are no A-list English managers. There has never been a successful English coaching school. The last English manager to win the English league was direct football’s Howard Wilkinson. This is why England have Southgate. This is why England have players who thrive in defined roles, why the pegs are square not round. Shouting at the only manager of the past 50 years to figure out a way to fudge this; well, that is definitely one way of trying to fix it.
Where does this leave the current iteration before Düsseldorf on Saturday?
Much will depend on how England start, on how the team feel about themselves after four difficult games. And as ever the noise will be a factor. Another paradox: the toxic energy around Southgate is further evidence of how well he has done his job. This is what you have to fight against, what you have to swallow.
Imagine trying to do the job with all that going on. Imagine doing it as well as anyone ever has, while also being told constantly that you are a fraud and a stuffed shirt, that you are the problem. A manager who came in talking about freeing the players from pressure has spent the past week talking about little else. Southgate is far from perfect. But he deserves his roses just for getting to the end of this. — Guardian
