Gareth Southgate isn't perfect - but a new manager won't magically end all those years of hurt

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England lost another major final, but Gareth Southgate still deserves respect despite the mistakes he has made.

One day, according to the fundamental laws of probability, it will finally come home. It wasn’t to be in Berlin, when England were ultimately outmatched and outwitted by Spain in the final of Euro 2024, but it’s overwhelmingly probable that eventually, perhaps in the distant future, England’s men will win a major tournament. Until then, all we can do is reflect on the words of American author William Goldman, uttered through the lips of The Princess Bride’s Westley – life is pain, and anyone who says different is selling something.

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England were trying to sell the dream that it might just be different this time, and they flunked the pitch. The fact that it was by the faintest of margins – the inch by which Mikel Oyarzabal stayed onside, the two separating Declan Rice’s header from the far side of the Spanish goal line – probably didn’t make anybody feel much better as they trudged home from the pub. For all that England are so much better than they used to be, have been for decades and generations, they still lost. Again.

They were probably trying to sell replica kits, too, this being football’s commodified era, and you might wonder if they were successful on that score between the ludicrous wrangling over the gently redesigned flag and another tournament which ended in bowed heads and a mournful montage at the end of the BBC’s coverage. The last part is an assumption, admittedly, as I was doing my own trudge back before they got there – was it a slow piano rendition of We’re On The Ball, perhaps?

Even if they did shift some serious merchandise this was, fundamentally, yet another failed grab at a trophy. Managers and players come and go, the tournaments move from one country to the next, and whole tactical eras of the sport unfurl and collapse, but the one absolute constant is the agony. Well, that and the post-mortem, although at least the tenor is different there these days.

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Gone are the days of “root and branch” reviews promised after every humiliating early exit. England are quite good these days, even if they are still not quite good enough, and The FA are simply begging Gareth Southgate to stay on for one more crack at a cup, no further questions asked. A fair few fans will disagree with that wish, especially in the raw moments after the game when the final whistle is still ringing in the nation’s collective ears (was this really the one game which had to end without a couple of excruciating extra minutes found down the back of the sofa, by the way?) – but is the Southgate Hate, whose proponents have found their voice once more, correct? Or did he get the most any manager possibly could out of this team and this tournament?

Southgate has insisted that he will take a few days before making his final decision but he has spoken like a man who thinks that the end of this contract will also be the end of his tenure. Perhaps knowing that he cannot leave as a national hero will light enough of a fire to make him ask for one more go around before he walks off into the sunset, but the signs suggest that this is the end of an eight-year reign which has been objectively more successful than that of any other England manager since the great Sir Alf Ramsey, but which has still earned him as much hatred as appreciation and respect.

Watching Sunday evening’s slow burn defeat to Spain, one can at least understand some of the frustrations, if not necessarily the ferocity of the backlash. England, blessed with so many sublimely talented players, essentially conceded defeat in midfield and set up to defend deep, stymie the opposition and hope to nick something on the counter-attack - but were simultaneously sluggish up front, with a system which didn’t seem to suit Harry Kane in the slightest, and lacked invention and guile despite having some of the most gifted attacking players on the planet.

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Kane loves to drop deep and has been superb in that role for years now, but his much-vaunted work as a ‘quarterback’ has only really worked with fast wide forwards bursting beyond him in the mould of Son Heung-Min or Raheem Sterling. In this tournament, Southgate had him simultaneously dropping back off the centre-halves and also acting as the last man forward at the same time. It didn’t work, and Southgate didn’t figure out how to solve that particular puzzle. With Spain’s high line, this probably was exactly the game in which to drop Kane and start with Ollie Watkins instead.

So there were errors and missteps and they may well have cost England the game. But there was also a lot of good in there. England may have ceded territory and possession in the first half but they also prevented Spain from creating anything, and it was only positioning errors in the second half which cost them the match as space suddenly appeared down England’s right – three times, two goals and a near miss. Other than that, England defended exceptionally well and while Southgate deserves constructive criticism for mistakes made in his attacking set-up, he did a fine job of figuring out how to blunt the best offensive side in the tournament.

But ultimately, Spain looked like a side who had taken the bedrock of the system and standards laid down by the great team of 2008-2012 and used it as a template upon which their current crop of players could expand and flourish. England, meanwhile, still look like a side who have found their own system and style but are limited by it, hemmed in by its strictures and lacking the vision and tactical acuity to venture beyond its borders.

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If Southgate does pack his things and leave St. George’s Park this week, then he will have laid down the strongest of foundations for the next man in but won’t have found a way to allow his players to grown beyond that sturdy framework and impose themselves on other teams. That is a failure, but it should not undermine the fact that he has taken the Three Lions further than any England manager in generations.

He has detoxified the experience of being an England player, breathed belief and expectation back into the squad and fanbase and given them a template of possession-based football which, while not always thrilling to watch, has been highly successful over the course of many years. Perhaps the best thing now really is for England to move on, to find a coach who can keep all the good work Southgate has done in place while adding some of the nuanced tactical understanding that he arguably lacks, but any reading which suggests that as the clear-cut solution is surely over-zealous.

Perhaps the next man up will rip it all up and start again, a move which would represent a wild and likely ill-advised roll of the dice. Perhaps they won’t be any better at all. Southgate may not be Pep Guardiola, but short of actually appointing Guardiola (which may not be completely impossible, in fairness) it’s hard to be sure which manager available to England would possess so much strategic acumen that they really can blow right past what Southgate was capable of accomplishing with this squad.

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And whoever the next manager is and whenever they come in, perhaps they will fare no better than the dozen different men who have taken the helm between Ramsey and Southgate and failed to find a way to make it all come together under the immense weight of all the hope and expectation. Southgate is imperfect but has sold us more of that sweet, tempting and deceptive hope than anyone else to sit in his chair for more than half a century – and he has proven that he can take this team right the way through major tournaments, another achievement which eluded his 12 predecessors even in eras in which tournaments were shorter.

Major tournament football is incredibly hard, a delicate balancing act involving tying together players you can’t entirely pick and choose into a functional tactical framework despite only getting to spend a few weeks a year with them - all while trying to insulate them from immense psychological pressure. Southgate has been superb at squad management, has done a fine job of updating England’s tactical baseline for the modern era and has only failed to get those final details right in the crunch moments in critical second halves of matches right at the end of the line.

Criticise Southgate, by all means, because he has got things wrong, but try to remember the dignity and decency with which he has conducted himself and remember that he has achieved so much more than many more vaunted and experienced managers before him. Remember that the grass many not always been any greener and remember how much harder it all was before he came along. Remember that England really were two incredibly fine margins away from winning 2-1 instead. And remember, always, that life is pain – especially if you’re an England fan. Start from there and it will all be a little easier next time.

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