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Gareth Southgate’s England tenure is on a knife-edge.
Their last-16 tie against Slovakia on Sunday in Gelsenkirchen could well be his final England game after nearly eight years in charge. Lose, and it is almost impossible to see how he could continue into next season, even if he does have six months left on his contract.
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Even if England win through to a quarter-final against Italy or Switzerland the following Saturday, the dynamic will stay the same: one defeat from disaster, from the end of the line.
This end-of-era feel is all bracingly new for the current England team. Only three of them — Harry Kane, Kyle Walker and John Stones — were there for Roy Hodgson’s last game, the infamous defeat to Iceland that saw England exit Euro 2016 at the first knockout hurdle.
Most of these players have never experienced anything at international level like the booing directed at Southgate at full-time in Cologne on Tuesday after the goalless draw with Slovenia that confirmed them as Group C winners. (Nor for that matter has Southgate, who has been jeered by England fans before, at Molineux and in Milan, but never had empty plastic pint cups thrown at him like that.)
Over the past year or so, the England players have spoken with one voice about how much they love working with Southgate and how much they want him to stay on. If that is what they think, they still have an opportunity to make it happen, or at least make it likelier, starting at the weekend. But then, very little of what the players have said over the past few weeks has been backed up on the pitch so far at this European Championship.
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But, ultimately, the buck stops with Southgate.
England’s previous three tournaments have been defined by a sense of serenity, of the manager calmly navigating the good ship Gazball through choppy waters. Moments that would have overwhelmed previous English teams — a penalty shootout, a knockout game against a top side — were successfully negotiated.
Even when things went wrong, Southgate always exuded the sense of having charted the course in advance. The system and the team for any given tournament were always clear from the start.
Even when England changed formation at the previous Euros in 2021, it was not the ripping up of the playbook but rather referring to a new chapter within it. When they switched from the 4-2-3-1 to a 3-4-3 for the Germany game in the round of 16, it was a move that was years in the planning, Southgate having left the 2018 World Cup cursing the fact that England did not have a tactical Plan B.
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Of course, Southgate is open to the criticism of being too wedded to his pre-made plans, of not being able to wrest back control of the ship when the wheel starts to spin, such as against Croatia in the 2018 World Cup semi-final or Italy in the Euros’ final three years ago. Sometimes, small but world-historical details have gone against him, like Marcus Rashford’s shootout penalty hitting the post against Italy at Wembley with Gianluigi Donnarumma diving the other way, or Kane’s going over the bar against France at 2-1 down late in the 2022 World Cup quarter-final.
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And yet all of that feels far away from where England are now. Because in those tournaments, England had a plan and they stuck to it, for better or worse. But right now, for the first time since Southgate replaced Sam Allardyce in the autumn of 2016, it is not clear what the plan is.
England were so poor for so much of their Euro 2024 group stage that it is difficult to have too much faith in where they are heading. The good ship Gazball, so serene in the past, so majestic, now looks as if she is holed beneath the waterline. If Southgate does not want to go down with her, he will have to make emergency repairs just to stay afloat. He has never been in this position before.
All is not lost: England have a very good defensive record, conceding just one goal in the three group matches and giving up very few chances. They have experienced players and match-winning attacking talent, at least in theory. And they are in the easier half of the last-16 draw. They are still, despite everything, the bookmakers’ favourite to win the tournament. The path to triumph looks narrower than it did when their tournament began 11 days ago, but it is still there in front of them.
But what is so worrying about England right now is the largeness of the questions they are wrestling with.
These are not simple personnel toss-ups like they faced at the World Cup 18 months ago (Raheem Sterling or Rashford? Phil Foden or Bukayo Saka?), but rather the fundamental questions about how they want to play: do they want to press high, or be compact and hard to beat? Is Kane leading the line as a No 9 or playing as a No 10 with runners beyond? Is Jude Bellingham a No 10? Is Foden? Do they have any intention of using the left-hand side of the pitch? Is there anyone in their 26-man squad who can provide the right balance in midfield?
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We could go on like this all day. The group-stage campaign threw up enough questions to occupy us all for the next few years. (Here’s another: will future generations see that Slovenia game as an all-time awful tournament 0-0, like Algeria 2010 or Slovakia 2016, or one of the more forgivable ones, like Scotland 2021 or USA 2022?) But England travel from their Blankenhain base to Gelsenkirchen in a couple of days and there is not enough time between now and then for Southgate to return to first principles.
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What Southgate needs, if he is to avoid sinking, are some short-term fixes. It is easy to dismiss sticking-plaster solutions, but that could be the only way to stop England taking on more water. Bobby Robson did it at the World Cups in 1986 and 1990, and in the latter England ended up a penalty shootout away from the final. There is no point in planning for a distant future when you might be in the last-chance saloon.
So what would these fixes look like?
It feels imperative that Kobbie Mainoo should start, given how comfortable he looked on the ball as a half-time substitute on Tuesday, a rare English midfielder who lifted his team-mates.
There will be cases made for dropping Bellingham or Saka, or maybe even Kane or Declan Rice. No player should be sacrosanct, but it might be that Saka could be redeployed on the left flank, going where no Englishman has gone before so far this tournament. At least one of Cole Palmer and Anthony Gordon should also come in, providing some of the confidence and ingenuity that is draining out of everyone else.
Given the situation England are in, Southgate may as well be bold.
This is very different from his one change for the last-16 tie that he made at Euro 2020 and in Qatar, a delicate and specific tweak to address a particular issue. But we are no longer in the era of fine-tuning. These are emergency repairs to save the ship.
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Southgate in Southgate - He turned a nation on, now it turns on him
(Top photo: Ryan Pierse — UEFA via Getty Images)
