I’M A REALIST, I’M A ROMANTIC, I’M AN INDECISIVE …
The phrase “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” could have been invented for the England football team, if only it hadn’t been coined by some bloody foreigner. Every few years they and their followers restart the same pattern of hope, expectation, arrogance, insecurity, despair, failure and BBC montages. We know how tournament football works: when the going gets tough, England get going on the first available flight back home. Holland gave us Total Football; Spain introduced tiki-taka to the world; England bring their unique kind of gallows hubris.
At least until now. Gareth Southgate is doing things differently – and not only because he’s the first manager since the dawn of Opta stats to wear a beard. In the same week that Roy Hodgson anointed himself for winning the European Bring On A Few Young Players Championship 2016, Southgate tipped the usual gallows hubris on its head by giving the players a rollocking before they’d even had chance to mess up!
Southgate was talking about the failings of the last 50 years, not just England’s effortlessly hilarious defeat to Iceland at Euro 2016, and it was not a variation on Brian Clough’s mildly counter-intuitive opening gambit at Leeds, so much as an introduction to the New Realism.
“I’m not sure we’ve always looked at ourselves in the mirror as closely as we should, that’s what we need as a football nation,” Southgate said, symbolically caressing his beard in front of a 66x90ins slab of hand-blown Venetian glass. “We have to get off the island and learn from elsewhere. We have some great strengths and if we couple those with some other traits we could be more powerful than anybody, but we have a lot of work to get to that point.”
Tonight England get to see how the other half live, by visiting the world champions. England have actually won their last three games in Germany – including the World Cup-winning 5-1 victory in 2001 – yet there is still a sense that England are Germany’s weibchen. The main reason for that is Germany invariably beat England when it matters.
Southgate confirmed to the Fiver on Snapchat that he will play three at the back in Dortmund, with Michael Keane making his debut. He can try anything he likes, no matter how outlandish – he can grow a beard, repeatedly refer to Henry Winter as “Our Enery”, even revive antiquated concepts such as honesty, accountability and standards, all the while citing a killer catch-all justification: the alternative hasn’t done much good for the last 50 years, has it?
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“The problem wasn’t with me, it was with [Guardiola], and he never came to terms with it. It is something that drives me, gives me adrenaline and extra motivation” – Zlatan Ibrahimovic is totally over it. Promise.
FIVER LETTERS
“Blinking Flip. Now to be in with a chance of the prizeless letter o’ the day we have to watch a short video. It was bad enough when we had to be witty and erudite. Speaking of which where has Guardian Soulmates gone?” – John Stainton.
“Do you have a Mourinho bash quota in the fiver these days? Twice last week, once already this week and its only Tuesday. I look forward to Thursday’s edition where you somehow manage to find a way to lay the blame for England’s humiliation in Germany at Mourinho’s door” – Stephen Yoxall [please see SWMs].
• Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. And if you’ve nothing better to do you can also tweet The Fiver. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’the day is … John Stainton.
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BITS AND BOBS
Ronnie Moran, former Liverpool player, coach and caretaker manager, and stalwart of the Anfield Boot Room throughout the club’s most gilded era, has died aged 83.
With everything but the FA Cup ruined, and Wenger set to stay on for next season, the only thing Arsenal fans care about is the contract situation for Alexis Sánchez and Mesut Özi … oh, you’ll have to wait until the summer. “My news is that I have no news for you,” Arsène Wengered.
Anybody that is worried about a summer without football will only have to hold on until July: Manchester United are going to USA! USA!! USA!!! for their annual pre-season 0-0 penalty-shootout with Real Madrid, Barcelona and Manchester City, among others.
Mr Roy has lashed out at criticism of his tactics during England’s cataclysmic Euro 2016 campaign.”I was totally uninterested in those type of comments, which I regard as purely irrelevant and dishonest,” he FAKE NEWSED. “No one whose opinion I respect would have said anything like that, otherwise I would have heard about it.”
The former football coach Barry Bennell has denied 20 charges of sexual abuse against four boys in the 1980s.
STILL WANT MORE?
Do you fancy effortlessly bossing all future World Cup 2018 pub conversations with Big Website insight and tactical nous? Then read, digest and regurgitate our guide to how the contenders are shaping up for Russia.
Barney Ronay’s column on England’s new realism includes the bonus feature of a comments section describing England’s house band as “an Orwellian torture device designed to break the human spirit.”
Enough Wenger-Shakespeare analogies already, pleads Marina Hyde. “King Lear is a particularly favoured comparison to the Arsenal manager, with those who deploy it usually implying that so much heath-based ranting could have been avoided if the old kings had just naffed back off to manage Monaco.”
Poor old Manchester United, sobs José Mourinho. But does the Portuguese have a point?
This week’s Knowledge asks: which football manager has been sacked by one club the most times?
Steve McClaren’s second offing by Derby has invited readers to wonder which managers have been ushered through the same Do One door the most. And here are the answers in this week’s Knowledge.
What’s it like to be a one-appearance, er, ‘wonder’ in the Premier League? Stephen Tudor speaks to those who didn’t manage to go on to greater things.
If the MLS wants to shed its image as a retirement home, the signing of half-a-decade-ago’s Bastian Schweinsteiger by Chicago Fire sure ain’t helping, reckons Kristan Heneage.
China are the England of Asian football: big hopes followed by inevitable failure. So says Cameron Wilson.
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