Can anyone remember those days when the common assumption about Gareth Southgate was that he was too gentlemanly, too afraid of upsetting people and, ultimately, too damn nice to succeed in an industry where all the people at the top occasionally have to use their elbows?
That nonsense stopped being trotted out once Southgate made it a priority to phase out Wayne Rooney, the player around whom England’s national team had been shaped for the previous decade. Theo Walcott found out he had been jettisoned with a telephone call on the morning of his 28th birthday and Chris Smalling was cast into the wilderness on the basis, as Southgate put it so bruisingly, that England needed central defenders who could play it out from the back. Smalling has helped Manchester United accumulate the most clean sheets in the Premier League but that, as far as Southgate is concerned, cuts no ice. Don’t think for one second that behind the polite demeanour, the perfectly knotted tie and the gentle touches, the manager of the England team is afraid of making the big calls.
All of which may be useful in the coming days, with his squad for the World Cup to be announced on Wednesday, if tough questions have to be asked about whether it is still feasible to imagine Jack Wilshere can be the centrepiece of the project.
Could anybody be surprised if Wilshere has to be cut free? Disappointed, yes, when England’s options in central midfield are never going to have anyone overdosing on optimism. But surprised? That’s a different matter entirely, when Wilshere is so notoriously fragile that choosing him would be to risk a potential no-show.
Roy Keane, a television pundit whose lack of pleasantries should not mask the fact his on-air performances usually involve a hard, withering reality, already appears to have made up his own mind, with various diatribes about the way Wilshere has been “drifting” for too long. The debate, according to Keane, is no longer just about Wilshere’s fitness but more whether the Arsenal midfielder should now be considered “the most overrated player on the planet”.
Overrated or not, Wilshere will always have a devoted fan club who recall the days when he was capable of shaping elite football matches and the happier times when it was easy to champion him as the great hope, the diamond of his generation.
But then, of course, the injuries took hold, and consider what happened when Southgate recalled him for England’s friendlies against the Netherlands and Italy in March. It was Wilshere’s first call-up since that zombie-like performance for Roy Hodgson’s team against Iceland in the European Championship. He trained, he sat in front of the press to say how glad he was to be back and he promised that, this time, he felt better than ever. The headlines were written and then, on the day the team were due to fly to Amsterdam, an old knee problem flared up and he pulled out.
If that was a one-off, if it wasn’t part of a wider pattern and so thoroughly predictable, it could be passed off as nothing more than unfortunate timing. Sadly for Wilshere, it was part of a narrative that would already have eliminated him from Southgate’s thinking were it not for the fact that Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain’s ruptured knee ligaments have left England even more thinly spread in midfield than usual.
Southgate, after all, knows from personal experience how disruptive it can be when a key player is lost through injury in a major tournament. In the 1998 World Cup, he started England’s first game against Tunisia alongside Sol Campbell and Tony Adams in a three-man central defence. The next day the squad flew back to their base at La Baule in Brittany and had a warm-down on their training pitches. Southgate usually wore strapping around his ankle because it had been weakened by previous injuries. On this occasion he didn’t think it necessary because it was meant to be only a light jog, nothing else. Then David Batty kicked a stray ball high in the air and Southgate, forgetting himself, went to control it, twisted his ankle and felt his ligaments go. It didn’t need an x-ray to know the diagnosis. “Out of the World Cup because of the most stupid injury imaginable.”
Southgate’s distress that day was made worse by Glenn Hoddle’s insensitivities and the memory, sitting disconsolately on the team bus, of listening to his manager repeatedly shouting: “What were you doing?” in front of all the other players. “The circumstances of the injury galled Glenn,” Southgate later said. “They devastated me. All my life I had worked to get to the world stage, to prove I could do it at the highest level. This was my opportunity to change my international epitaph, to give the public something that might have stood alongside the [Euro 96] penalty miss. And now it was gone.”
Equally, perhaps now Southgate is in charge, relying on the fitness of his players and wanting to build a recognisable system of his own, he understands better why “all Glenn could think of was the hole in his side and the probability of having to go from a back three to a back four”.
Southgate did not go home from France. He stayed in the England camp and worked slavishly to get fit again, including three-times-a-day sessions with the team’s physios. He was told the injury would usually take five weeks of rehabilitation. He was back within two and came on a substitute in Saint-Étienne when England had their penalty shootout against Argentina.
Wilshere, on the other hand, does not do near-miraculous comebacks from the injuries that have sabotaged his career. Plus there is overwhelming evidence that the cumulative effect has dramatically diminished his ability to influence games.
Wilshere has managed 10 90-minute performances for Arsenal in the Premier League this season, though only two since 20 January. Last season, there were 15 on loan for Bournemouth and, before that, the last occasion was September 2014. For England, he has managed it only six times. On average, each of his performances in a 34-cap international career has lasted 56 minutes.
Against all this, there is still the unshakeable fact that, every now and then, there are flashes to suggest Wilshere can still be a creative force. That is why, of all the selection dilemmas for Southgate, this might be his more difficult choice ahead of Wednesday’s announcement. But they are only flashes. Wilshere has to be vulnerable and, whatever Southgate decides, it is difficult to avoid the reality, as sad as it is, that the man in question will probably never be the player English football wanted him to be.
Surely Fifa must see that two voices are stronger than one?
That was a fine speech Jürgen Klopp delivered, in absentia, at the Football Writers’ Association annual dinner and particularly impressive in his praise for Rhian Brewster, Liverpool’s teenage striker, for his decision last December to speak publicly about the various incidents of alleged racial abuse he had encountered in his young football career.
“During the past 12 months Rhian has established himself as one of the most exciting prospects in English football,” Klopp said. “He has grown and risen in status at Liverpool. He won the World Cup for your country at his age level. He won the Golden Boot at that same tournament. He made his family, his friends, his club and his country, proud. But it was away from the football pitch – and instead in the pages of a UK newspaper – where Rhian made an even bigger impact on the game we all love.”
Admittedly, I’m a little biased in these thoughts, as the journalist Rhian asked to tell his story, but Klopp struck jut the right note when he described it “as frustrating and depressing as it is inspirational and uplifting” that it took a boy of 17, as Brewster was then, to speak up in the hope of shaming the sport into doing something about it.
Hopefully, in the process it might have given the football authorities a necessary jolt. Yet it isn’t easy to be clear about that last point.
Uefa decided there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed with his complaint about a Spartak Moscow player from a Uefa Youth League tie. I can understand that – and expected it – on the basis it was one boy’s word against another. Less acceptable, however, is Fifa offering the same excuse of “insufficient evidence” from an incident in the Under-17s World Cup final when it was not just Brewster but his team-mate Morgan Gibbs-White who reported a Spanish opponent. That’s the word of two boys against another – and hard evidence, you or I might assume. Or in the language of Fifa: move on, nothing to see here.
