England’s ‘centrist dad’ strategy was destined to fail

So it is not coming home, after all. A shame. But, despite the excited tabloid headlines and flags on housing estates, did anyone really begin to wonder? To dare to dream? Did England’s curiously bloodless sequence of displays, in which some of the most expensive players in the world played with all the appetite for glory of a gelded plough team, really ignite romantic fantasies of ’66 revisited?

No, England failed upwards just long enough to get us to the Euros final. And then they were paella. A few days later, so was Gareth Southgate’s career.

While it might be stretching the sock of analogy too tightly over the shin-pad of comparability, there were surely echoes in Sunday’s ultimate defeat for Southgate of Keir Starmer’s famous victory barely 10 days earlier. One cannot complain too much about the lack of spectacle, on either occasion. Finals are rarely the greatest games of the tournament, let alone when England is playing in them. Likewise, for all we eagerly look for one ‘telling moment’, General Elections are usually won and lost months or even years before polling day. America’s surely was this weekend.

There is too much at stake in a final. A single misstep and all is lost. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles has to choose between risking a glorious death and certain immortality in legend – or the quiet life of a shepherd. He chooses the former. Then, in the Odyssey, we meet him again in the afterlife and learn that he regrets his rash decision. It seems that Southgate’s men and boys have internalised that lesson all too deeply.

The dubious virtues that led England to make steady, almost indiscernible progress through more group stages and knockout matches under Southgate than any other manager have suffocated them at both Euros finals. The Beautiful Game becomes the Dismal Science. Prudence is elevated to the point of inertia. Patience and focus are decoupled from ambition.

So no, the excitement was going to have to happen earlier in the campaign. Which of course is where this theory falls down. Because it didn’t happen there, either. When a team as dull as England fails, it brings to mind Raskolnikov’s bitter accusation in Crime and Punishment: ‘Your worst sin is that you’ve destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.’

England getting through to the final by the skin of the manager’s famously centre-forward teeth is one thing. No one minds a close-run thing. Indeed, we prefer it. Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat is as well-established a British trope as finding the price of one more pint in the coin pocket of a pair of jeans once was, just as they call last orders.

Yes, roller-coaster rides are fine. But being stuck in the back of a static vehicle for the entirety of a two-hour tailback, hearing our own whining voices repeatedly asking ‘Are we nearly there yet?’, is quite another. Football, at the end of the day, is an entertainment product. No one is demanding basketball scores, but at least one shot on goal per half litre of Birra Moretti is surely not too much to ask?

But no. Rather than the cut and dash of an Alexander the Great, a Henry V or a Napoleon cutting a swathe through Europe, Southgate’s men evoked the steady progress of a moderately talented but instinctively servile civil servant, as if rising through the ranks in a John le Carré novel dripping with declinist disdain. I don’t know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they bore the crap out of me.

It’s no wonder then that parallels with Keir Starmer’s election campaign have been so endemic, and were such a hostage to fortune. If the approach worked for one, surely it might work for the other? But whereas Starmer has a freshly re-organised trophy cabinet in Labour HQ with his contribution front and centre, Harry Kane and Co were cursed, and ultimately unable to carry their own Ming vase across the goal line. Because Starmer was up against the most busted Tory flush since Black Wednesday, and Southgate was up against the best.

Indeed, everybody expected the Spanish Inquisition on Sunday. They were always likely to extract the truth, the confession of our mediocrity with the merest flourish, the glimpse of the instruments of persuasion.

It may be over for Southgate but Starmer and his team now have it all to play for. It would be futile and self-defeating to wish them anything other than the best of luck, especially after Labour’s last 14 years of hurt. Yet, for all that Starmer got what he wanted, and the Tories got a well-deserved drubbing, there remains a faint tinge of the second rate even to such a big victory.

Yes, Labour has a huge majority, and the centrist priests have been able to reassure their congregations that the grown-ups are back in the room. But the new government is not so much a team for the ages, but rather one that owes its position to several own goals and a defence that collapsed on the beaches of Normandy with considerably less resolve than the Wehrmacht showed in 1944.

And England? We are fast approaching that grimly inevitable anniversary, when it will have been a further 30 years without a trophy since the original release of ‘Three Lions’ in 1996. Football’s coming home? Perhaps I should leave the last word with that gentle poet of English despair, Philip Larkin:

‘Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.’

That vase. That curiously still gleaming vase.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.