There was something oddly gripping this week about re-entering the distinct and self-contained narrative world of the Gareth Southgate England press conference.
These are the kind of events that disappear completely from the memory in between times. But one glimpse of that stern, avian profile frowning dutifully in front of a board covered with adverts and you’re hurled back instantly into a wholly realised place of tortured moral compromise, of penitent tactical self-justification, all of it ringed off-stage by the massed buttock-launching rocket assaults of English discontent.
What does Southgate look like these days anyway? A kindly anteater who just wants to teach you how to count to six? A curate with a secret? A disappointed minor Roman emperor on a 3,000-year-old coin?
Here we have a quietly spoken middle-aged man who appears at first glance to be giving testimony to the truth and valediction committee of a repressive state; except when you turn up the volume he’s saying things about Conor Coady or the lack of English left-backs in the Premier League. And who has, against any kind of logic, perhaps just through sheer visibility, become arguably the most wildly polarising public figure in the English national discourse.
On that note the main impression during an unusually nuanced and complex squad announcement press conference was that something has shifted here. And perhaps not before time because in many ways the Age of Gareth has already got stuck, moored at its polarised end-point.
Later that night I heard a caller on TalkSport explaining in lucid, persuasive detail that Southgate had only selected Eddie Nketiah as a skilled diversion tactic, a ruse to fool the media into not talking about his chief, unforgivable sin; the sin of loyalty.
This is currently the stick being used to beat Southgate. He is loyal. And this appears to be the worst thing you can be, the word itself pronounced with the kind of disdain usually reserved for concepts like murder or heresy or dog-kidnapping.
Yet even his weirder selections aren’t that hard to rationalise. Southgate has a vision of Kalvin Phillips at the base of a three-man midfield alongside Declan Rice. The Euros are a mere nine months away. He doesn’t see, say, James Ward-Prowse offering the same balance. This is at least understandable.
The selection of Harry Maguire does look, on the face of it, utterly bizarre, a footballer who seems to exist solely as Southgate’s spirit animal, his muse, his albatross, his obsession. Maguire is even a problem tactically, with a habit of taking his first step backwards as an attack builds, shielding his own lack of speed, but dragging the rest of the team back with him. But Maguire has good qualities too. Other players are injured. It’s not that weird as a fudge for now.
By contrast the dropping of Raheem Sterling is a jarringly ruthless act of logic. Sterling has been absent from squads, has seemed a little too comfortable. Other players are also good. Ideally he can come back with a point to prove.
Jordan Henderson is the really weird one, from the basic lack of tactical ambition to the fact he no longer plays in a suitably hard-edged league. But the Henderson selection was illuminating in other ways.
Two things are immediately apparent from Southgate’s discussion of the subject on Thursday. First, he has clearly changed the way he’s going to communicate. Southgate has been accused, often and angrily, of having “a woke agenda”. Well, not any more.
Compare, for example, Gareth on Thursday on Henderson playing in Saudi. “The concern is the intensity of the league.” Is it? Is that the concern? “He’s a good leader for us.” Is he? Shall we ask Mohamad al-Bokari about that, the Yemeni blogger sentenced to 10 years in a Saudi prison for supporting equal rights for same sex couples? Because it’s just, well, it seemed, with what you were saying before that you thought …
“The league is an intriguing one.” Reeeeeally? Is it? “I don’t see anyone protesting about oil.” Don’t you, Gareth? Not even, say, Just Stop Oil? Or the people who tried to stop Barclays from sponsoring Wimbledon? Is this it? Are we all done here? Pinned by moral relativism and whataboutery?
There is a sound case to be made that sticking to football might just come as a relief for everyone concerned. But it is undeniably a massive shift of position from: “We stand for inclusivity, and we’re very, very strong on that,” to: “Well, the UK does do a lot of business with Saudi.”
From: “I have a responsibility to the wider community to use my voice,” to dodging the chance to say anything much about the Spanish FA. From: “Our players are role models … we must recognise the impact they can have on society,” to refusing to touch even the easiest lob of a question on Mason Greenwood (“It’s a complex issue.”).
From: “It’s our duty to continue to interact with the public on matters such as equality, inclusivity and racial injustice,” to a bit of hurried, LGBTQ+ stuff about having friends “in that community” so “we have tried to be supportive”, but in the end “you have to live your life as you see fit”.
Does any of this matter? Did any of it matter before? Has anything actually been changed in between the two poles of new, weary, bearded-truther Gareth and previous hard-campaigning Gareth?
The point of interest here is that the world has done this to him. Having shifted the Overton window of acceptable England manager discourse so dramatically, having tried to show tolerance, protect his players and say the right things, Southgate has become, against all reason, one of the most divisive people in the country, a kind of aggregator tool for online discontent.
And footfall has now left him nowhere to go with this stuff. Make any kind of statement about Henderson performing PR for the Saudi government and he then has to have coherent opinions on Newcastle players, who are doing the same thing closer to home, not to mention Manchester City, who seem to have escaped the old hardline state propaganda tag these days.
Talk about politics, prejudice and liberal freedoms and suddenly he’s bumbling about the arms trade. Make too much noise about LGBTQ+ issues and he paints himself into a corner not just on player selection and tournament hosts, but his own future employment in a narrowing field.
Becoming England manager was famously described as the impossible job, back in the days when this simply meant overcoming deluded expectation. Southgate seemed to have skirted this by turning England from a team that lost to weaker nations into a team that loses to stronger ones.
But the 2018 World Cup was all it took to unleash the unceasing volcanic spume of English hope, English exceptionalism, the idea that just because England are now quite good the world must fall to its knees in terrified abeyance, that the success of others is by its nature an aberration, proof of betrayal by mismanagement. Chuck in some attempts to make sense of the world, to find moral pathways, to proselytise on behalf of his abused players, and Southgate finds himself out there now, dancing on a pin, bruised and worn by the world.
And as ever with England managers, as Southgate enters what is surely his last 10 months in the job, there is a sense of wear. Maybe people will like him more like this. Maybe he can finally locate a centre-half who can run fast, pass the ball and get in a Premier League team.
It doesn’t take away from his fascination. There was a play about Southgate recently which focused on the uplifting stuff, the unity, the bringing together. In reality he is a more nuanced figure than this, an embodiment of the falling short of that liberal voice, a decent man with ideas of right and wrong rubbing up against a thoroughly indecent world.
