Gareth Southgate is damned either way but England have tools to attack

Gareth Southgate should have learned from the fine-margins defeat by France in December and England’s squad has improved in the last four months. Photograph: Eddie Keogh/The FA/Getty

There is a nice note of circularity about the re-emergence of Roy Hodgson, English football’s own courtly blazered grail knight, in the same week that Gareth Southgate sets off on what will surely be his own final story cycle as England manager.

Hodgson is of course Southgate’s de facto predecessor in the job, setting aside the one-game Sam Allardyce interlude, which feels more than ever like the managerial equivalent of a half-remembered lost weekend on a Norwegian booze ferry. As England prepare for the double-header against Italy in Naples and Ukraine at Wembley, first steps on the gentle downhill slope towards Germany 2024, it is worth remembering just how lost they were back then.