KEVIN MCCALLUM: Gareth Southgate — the nearly manager, and his team that came ever so close

“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?”

Ah, Joni. If only they really, really knew what they had, but, alas, Gareth Southgate is gone, having exited a stage on which he was a director rather than a star.

Southgate, as the BBC opined this week, was a “nearly England manager leading a nearly England team, but that running theme of close, but not close enough leaves him open to those charges”.

Near, so near, yet far, so far. Faraway. So close. 

What would you have? To be near, to be close or far away from success, where there are no green shoots of optimism, just the bleak nothingness of where they paved the dream of paradise and put up a parking lot?

Not that parking lots are without their uses and worth, but it takes a ruthless man to go to a parking lot and use it to create glory, to plot the path to victory... unless you are Jose Mourinho and you are driving a big bus of players and looking for somewhere to park it.

Hope is why England fans could not fully embrace Southgate. He gave them hope. John Cleese, in the film Clockwise, said, “It’s not the despair. I can deal with the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.” 

Hope. It’s the first thing and the last. The last thing that is ever lost and the first thing that is reached for. “It’s the hope that kills you” is a very English saying, very stoic. The need to prepare for the worst to defend against the possibility the best may never come.

Sir Peter Ustinov has been credited with coming up with that saying and even if he didn’t, it has much of the Ustinov humour and droll about it. He also said, “Life is unfair, but remember, sometimes it is unfair in your favour”, which is hope in another form.

Southgate is a real-life version of Ted Lasso, the comedy series in which an American coach was appointed at an English football team to lead them to failure. He was supposed to kill hope, but, instead, he created it. His speech in the final episode of the first series is a moment to savour: 

“So I’ve been hearing this phrase y’all got over here that I ain’t too crazy about. ‘It’s the hope that kills you’. Y’all know that? I disagree, you know? I think it’s the lack of hope that comes and gets you. See, I believe in hope. I believe in belief. Now, where I’m from, we got a saying too, yeah? A question, actually. ‘Do you believe in miracles?’”

Southgate, pilloried and insulted, drenched in angry beer and questioned, “has defined himself and surely redefined the job — making the impossible seem possible — with regard to man‑management, his consistency, the expert reading of the room, the note-perfect delivery of his messages,” wrote David Hytner in the Guardian.

Southgate was very aware of hope and how to temper it. After England had beaten Slovenia at the Euros, he said, “We have brought the joy back into playing for England. We have to be very careful of where we head with it.”

England fans headed down the road of derangement in the lead-up to the final against Spain, their joy unbridled, their expectations overwhelming, the long wait to bring it home one more match away. England enjoyed the build-up days before the final more than the final itself: “This, then, is us: a country where the switchback ride sometimes feels it is the destination,” wrote Marina Hyde of that mad week of, I have to say it, hope.

Southgate’s most magnificent success was to leave a legacy of expectation. England were a nowhere team sitting in a nowhere land when he took over eight years ago. He made them a nearly team, which is, as the Guardian put it, also his greatest failing: 

“Perhaps in the end Southgate’s real crime is to give people what they want, or at least what they say they want. Never do that. If you do, they’ll never forgive you for it.”

They will miss him now he’s gone.