Gareth Southgate has reminded his England players the onus is on them to give themselves the best chance of competing at an elite level, and suggested poor off‑field behaviour draws more pressure and is “not intelligent” following the furore which erupted around Wayne Rooney and other team-mates during the recent international window.
Rooney felt compelled to apologise “unreservedly” after being photographed last month socialising at a wedding party in the team hotel in the early hours of Sunday morning following England’s World Cup qualifying win against Scotland at Wembley on the Friday. Southgate, who has signed a four-year contract to oversee the senior side on a permanent basis, had granted his squad the night off before the friendly with Spain on the following Tuesday evening, with other players choosing to leave the premises for a night out of their own.
That behaviour had been scrutinised in the wake of England’s failure to make a positive impression at successive major tournaments, and in the context of the Football Association’s desire for the side to compete at a higher level under Southgate’s stewardship. “There is a level of expectation when you are with England,” the manager said. “We talk about pressure, and we spend most of our time trying to relieve it, so if we put ourselves in positions where we are going to increase that pressure … it is not intelligent.
“As a playing squad and group of staff, it’s important we recognise we want to be a top team, so everything we do has to be geared towards improving. There has to be some time to unwind, to have a glass of beer or wine, but that has to be done at the appropriate time and at the right level if we aren’t going to inhibit the way we perform. Fundamental to it all is how we are going to perform at the high level because, in international and top European football in this day and age, physical preparation is key.”
Rooney ultimately withdrew from the squad after suffering discomfort in his knee. He is understood to have stayed up to around 5am on 13 November, with Southgate last speaking to him at around 10.30pm the previous night. “I was watching a video of Spain, which is a usual Saturday night for me, and he popped his head round the door to see what we were doing as a group of coaches,” he said. He denied telling the 31-year-old to retire to his room. “The only person I’ve told to go to bed in the last few years is my son, and he’s never too fussed about that discussion either.”
The new manager, whose contract runs through to the 2020 European Championship and does not include a break clause after the World Cup in two years’ time, indicated Rooney remains his captain, even if he is not guaranteed to start every game for his country. He intends to speak with his players when they next convene in March, for a friendly in Germany and the home qualifier against Lithuania, to discuss how they the squad spend their free time on get-togethers, with the practice of allowing them to spend the night as they see fit likely to be curtailed.
“I’m not convinced that Draconian measures are going to work with English players, and we’ve maybe had a go at that in the past,” said Southgate, appearing to point towards Fabio Capello’s disciplinarian approach. “But there have got to be lines of what is acceptable and what isn’t. The key is always thinking about performance. The players are involved in [drawing them up] because you are giving them ownership and accountability. And, if they want to be top, top players – which I believe they do – they have to recognise what is going to help us achieve that, and what is going to detract from that.
“A lot of them are working with top coaches at their clubs and will see what is going to help them be successful and what is going to inhibit them, but if we think we are good enough to take on the best in the world without doing everything right along the way … well, good luck with that. The days are gone from when I was younger, when we’d have beers after a game, or fish and chips on the way home on the coach. We probably fell off the bus. The rest of the world aren’t doing that.
“We are competing in a different landscape and have to be as professional and well prepared as everybody else before we even start looking at how good we are technically or tactically. The culture we create, the environment that we want to have, has got to be one of excellence. And we’ve got to strive to be the best we can be. Because for me the end-game isn’t getting the job here. They have to ask themselves: ‘How good do we want to be? What do we want to be going forward?’ Every athlete has that decision to make. And, remember, we’ve got good competition for places.”
