World Cup 2018: Gareth Southgate Hands Onus To England Players

MATTHEW DUNN

 It is time for the talking to stop. After the most media-friendly build up to a World Cup in recent memory, the words are finally slowing to a halt.

“I am conscious of that when I was a player, there were moments before the game when I thought … ‘all the manager can do now is f*** it up for me and put me off my game’ because I was ready and didn’t want to hear too much more,” Gareth Southgate admitted with surprising bluntness.

“And I think the boys are ready. We tried to put in as much tactical information in the early part of the week so that today’s session was about enjoyment, feeling the ball and being physically ready for the game.

“So, there will be some key messages but it will really just be around transferring what they are doing every day because that level they are playing at every day is high and is getting better all the time.

“It’s a very proud moment, of course,” Southgate said. “My family are incredibly patriotic. My granddad was a marine. I’ve always been brought up with England being a core part of what we stood for and my life.

“To have played for England in major tournaments and now managing England is of course a huge honour.

“But my focus can’t be that I’m a tourist and I’m chuffed to be here. It is another game of football, on a pitch the size that these boys have played on all their lives and we have to prepare them that way.”

History celebrates great victories, not great battle plans. If Southgate’s decision to compensate for a lack of two world-class centre-back by introducing a third player into the heart of defence backfires, all this preparation is in danger of being discarded as an overthought mess.

Bravely he has dispensed with an experienced rear-guard, opting instead to put a rookie in goal. Fears over Danny Rose’s fitness in the heat of Volgograd sees him go into battle with one flank weakened and there is too much reliance on top gunner Harry Kane to hit the target. But it might just work.

Southgate’s tactics rely on energy and pace – two qualities which are already leaving their mark on this tournament.

Then there is that final, most English of qualities, bravery.

Nobody embodied that more than Southgate when he volunteered to take the sixth penalty against Germany in the Euro 96 semi-final shoot-out. Perhaps if he were to steer England to World Cup glory he might finally be allowed to forget that he missed it

Although perhaps the two things would actually be related.

“I have got a bit braver as I’ve got older and I guess that’s the freedom of realising that when you make mistakes, it’s the only way to learn and improve,” Southgate said.

“We have lads that are so exciting. I want them to go into this tournament and really go for it, be as good as they may be and not go back and think, ‘I wish I had been a bit braver and tried something and been prepared to give the ball away’

“We are not going to get everything right over the next three weeks – we haven’t got it right over the first three.

“But I don’t think anything I can face in the next few weeks can be any more difficult than what I have faced in my life already.

“My job is to create an environment for the players where they are able to express themselves and feel the confidence we have in them.

“They have a hunger to press and win the ball back, and want to play brave football. They want to be a bold and attacking team. That’s how I feel we should play. That’s why I joined the FA as under-21s coach, because I believed young English players could show something different.

“There was a perception of them across the world, a perception of English football and I thought it was possible to change that.”

Change the perception of English football? Now that is big talk. The nation waits to see word put into action at 7pm.