Gareth Southgate doesn’t deserve a knighthood

It was some achievement of England’s, frankly, not winning Euro 2020 given the players we had. As I sat down before kick off and began the customary cursing at the inexplicable omission once again of our best player, Jack Grealish, my wife tried to console me. The fact Gareth Southgate very clearly had no clue which was his best starting eleven was really a secret weapon, she said. It meant other managers couldn’t second guess him. Hmm, I thought.

The relentless corporatisation of the England football team over the last two decades has been an exercise in eradicating flair – that quality most hated in boardrooms because it is unquantifiable. Putting charismatic Englishmen capable of doing something brilliant and unexpected in charge of the national team was certainly something we used to do – Sir Bobby Robson, Glenn Hoddle, Terry Venables, for example – but the practice came to a hard stop at the turn of the century with the end of Kevin Keegan’s tenure.