One thing that is certain when you run your country 98 times is that it builds up an instinct in you about when to move forward and when to take a step back.
The last few days in Blankenheim saw England manager Gareth Southgate turn down the volume a bit. Golf, cricket, cycling, anything to take his mind off the stresses and strains of a major tournament.
“I like being here and I want to stay here for another two weeks,” Southgate said on Saturday. “I don’t have to rush back from anything. I am in the final of the staff padel competition. The kitman is my partner, it is the team from heaven.
‘In our world today we are surrounded by science and data, but sport is about fun and entertainment.
‘Sometimes football is all you have to think about during a tournament and you need other things to enjoy and concentrate on.
Gareth Southgate has turned down the dial ahead of the upcoming Euro 2024 knockout
Beer in plastic cups had been thrown at him after his team’s draw against Slovenia
The Three Lions boss stressed the need for things other than football to ‘enjoy and concentrate on’
“I think we had a good week in that sense.”
Whether Southgate and kitman Pat Frost can see their padel competition to the end depends entirely on what happens on Sunday evening in the Veltins Arena.
England take on Slovakia with a place in the last eight of Euro 2024 at stake. If Southgate guides his team through, he will be able to lead his country for the 100th time next Saturday in Düsseldorf. If he doesn’t, he will most likely leave the position he has held for nearly eight years.
No wonder the 53-year-old has tried to lighten the mood at the English base camp. Their journey through the group stages was not only inconclusive, but also took place amid a cacophony of criticism, both from home and in the stadiums here in Germany. It has been an unusually stressful few weeks, to say the least.
Southgate had plastic beer cups thrown at him in Cologne on Tuesday after his team drew 0-0 with Slovenia, and admitted afterwards that his presence as England manager had made life difficult for his players.
So on Sunday night, back in the Ruhr Valley where England opened their tournament two weeks ago with a 1-0 defeat to Serbia, Southgate faces one of the biggest tests of his time with England. This is his fourth major tournament, but the first that has felt as uncomfortable as this one.
“I think the most important thing is that we know that what we’ve done over a long period of time works,” he said when asked to reflect on his time in the job.
‘As a younger manager you don’t always have evidence of results and you don’t know for sure where the players’ ideas are.
‘But as you get more experience, you know where the group of players are, you know when they are with you and you know what they have to do to win football games.
“There’s no doubt you can’t speed up that feeling, but that’s exactly where I feel right now and I’m really looking forward to this next phase of the competition.”
He has been thinking about his eight-year stint as national coach, which could end this summer
He has tried different ways to guide his team through the tournament
Southgate has tried in several ways to guide his team through the difficult early days of this tournament.
He suggested his players weren’t listening to some of the early criticism, only for captain Harry Kane to reveal that they were. Southgate then asked after the Slovenia game whether all the negativity could be directed at him.
On Sunday night he just has to find a way to make his team play better, if he can’t do that England will lose to the first team that can play well against them.
His refusal to make wholesale changes to his line-up suggests either stubbornness or faith in his players, depending on your point of view. He was also keen to resist accepting that England had ended up on the easier side of the draw.
“That’s really what we’ve been dealing with the whole tournament,” Southgate said.
‘When people say it was an easy draw, I don’t think Germany in the round of 16 last time (at Wembley) was an easy draw as we hadn’t beaten them in a tournament since 1966.
“So we can only deal with our own message to the players. We are very aware of the strengths of the opponents we are going to play against. Tournament football is tough and some of the best performances I have seen in this tournament have been from Slovakia, Georgia and Austria.
‘I saw some Slovakia matches months ago and was very impressed. They build from the back. In Stanislav Lobotoka they have a playmaker who can dictate the game. They get their full backs high early, they press very aggressively from the front so you have to be able to play through that pressure and they obviously have some experienced players and a very settled squad.
‘So yes, it will be an extremely tough match. We know that and we can’t do anything about what other people think.’
A penalty shootout is a possibility on Sunday, and England have some strong players in their ranks
Now that penalties are a possibility, England have some real masters of the art in their ranks.
Some, such as Cole Palmer and Ivan Toney, will not start in Sunday night’s match, but Southgate confirmed he is prepared to use them as substitutes, despite such a plan failing with the introduction of Jadon Sancho and Marcus Rashford towards the end of the 2020 European Championship finals, with both players subsequently missing penalties.
“We are constantly refining that process and we want to have as much control over it as possible,” Southgate said. “We have prepared over time and we certainly have a lot more regular penalty takers for their clubs than we did three or four years ago.
‘I think Argentina in the World Cup final brought on Pablo Dybala with two minutes to go and scored. In the Europa League final before our Euro final, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer brought on Alex Telles and Juan Mata in the 123rd minute. They scored but lost the game and he got slaughtered for not changing his goalkeeper. Hindsight is always the master in moments like that.
“You make decisions for the right reasons, but at the end of the day you are the only one who is accountable.”
If Southgate occasionally sounds like a man rather weary of the noise, chatter, presumption and suspicion that follows him – and every coach – through these tournaments, that’s because he is.
When he took the job after the Sam Allardyce debacle in the autumn of 2016, it was intended to be a short-term solution to a problem that no one could have foreseen. That he is still there almost a century after the games speaks volumes about what he has achieved. There is a section of the England fanbase that will never accept him and he has known that for a long time.
The England camp sang happy birthday to Jude Bellingham (left), 21, and Eberechi Eze (right), 26, on Saturday
He still derives an innate and instinctive pleasure from the practical side of his work. For example, on Saturday, Happy Birthday was sung twice in the team meeting, when Jude Bellingham turned 21 and Eberechi Eze turned 26.
He will be back on the sidelines for game 99 on Sunday evening, asking the England fans here to reiterate their support for the team from last Tuesday during the match.
Then it’s up to the players. Has Southgate found a way to drag their true selves to the surface? Did turning the knob back help?
If England are to progress, there simply has to be something different, something better on Sunday night. It is as big a test of Southgate’s credentials as ever before.