Wayne Rooney doesn’t get into the England team on form – certainly not with Adam Lallana playing with such verve and menace for Liverpool
As Planet Earth ponders the end of the world as we know it, Gareth Southgate really shouldn't find it too unthinkable to bench the skipper
A DRIVEN cross from Kyle Walker, a stooping header from Daniel Sturridge and there it was: Gareth Southgate, manager of England.
The too-nice-for-management, school-prefect type. The so-called FA ‘yes man’.
The middle-class boy from the Home Counties. Captain Sensible at three Premier League clubs.
The bloke they nicknamed ‘Nord’ after Denis Norden, hardly the sexiest TV star to be likened to.
And suddenly there he was — a made man. In the hall of fame along with Sir Alf, Sir Bobby, El Tel and, oh yeah, Big Sam, too.
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Possessor of what they used to call the second most important job in the country. The impossible job.
Pour a drop of cyanide in his chalice and toast him.
When Sturridge scored the first of England’s three headed goals after 24 minutes of utter tosh, Southgate punched the air repeatedly, gritting his teeth and possibly even letting slip the sort of word no milk monitor would ever utter.
And when Adam Lallana nodded the killer second from a Danny Rose centre, after a brief Scottish rally at the start of the second half, Southgate went down on one knee in the technical area and delivered a couple of upper cuts to the chill North London air.
His celebrations might have been a little livelier because his opposite number, Gordon Strachan, is a man he has little time for. And a man who will surely now lose his job.
If you’ve listened to Southgate over the previous few days, you could have been forgiven for thinking he wasn’t too bothered whether he got this job on a permanent basis or not. He was still being coy in his post-match interviews last night.
Butter wouldn’t melt. But don’t you believe it.
He doesn’t entirely fit his own caricature. Soft lads don’t play centre-half in the top flight for a decade and a half, they don’t take charge of Premier League clubs at the age of 35.
It didn’t take much, really, to get this job. Southgate was in the right place at the right time when Sam Allardyce self- combusted and the FA needed a man who, first and foremost, was less likely to shoot his mouth off over a pint of wine.
This four-match caretaker stint was a sham, a show trial.
All Southgate had to do was avoid defeat against the worst Scotland side ever to step on to Wembley’s hallowed turf. One who, for large parts, were as shocking as the shade of pink on their shirts. A Scotland team who didn’t even look like Scotland.
Getting the England job is the easy bit these days.
The field of candidates is so small, it borders on the non-existent even though the qualifiers are a cakewalk, the expectations have vanished, the salary is around £3million and he gets four months off following Tuesday’s friendly against the Spanish.
Southgate has been conservative these past three games.
Eight of last night’s starting 11 lined up in the humiliation by Iceland — two of the others were injured and the third, Harry Kane, came on as a sub.
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So he hadn’t exactly shredded Roy Hodgson’s manual.
The question now is whether the 46-year-old Southgate can be bolder, once confirmed.
His Under-21 team developed a reputation for elegant keep-ball, only to fall flat on their faces as soon as a tournament came around. But he has the right instincts and is far more in keeping with the FA’s ‘England DNA’ malarkey than his predecessor Allardyce.
No man will ever have been named England boss with a CV as unimpressive as Southgate’s.
But then this is no boom-time for English footballers, coaches or managers. He is an austerity manager, hoping for modest success with modest resources.
For Middlesbrough supporters this must have felt like a strange dream. Here were the worst two managers their club had employed in the past 30 years, taking command in a critical edition of the world’s oldest international fixture.
A high-stakes World Cup qualifier likely to spell the end for either Southgate or Strachan.
Southgate had led Boro to relegation in 2009 and later that year was replaced by Strachan who, the stats tell us, did an even worse job than the Englishman.
Both had been fine players but failed club managers and it said much about this fixture’s reduced circumstances that they should be leading their nations.
This was a damp-squib farewell for Strachan — even though there were 13,700 Tartan Army foot soldiers present and plenty more on the sauce in central London, many wearing the kind of comedy wigs favoured by Russ Abbott and the next President of the United States.
As the Trafalgar Square fountains ran with Tennent’s Super, we could have been back in the golden age of this fixture.
Except that Graeme Souness, Billy Bremner and Joe Jordan wouldn’t have been seen dead in radioactive salmon pink. And, of course, those Scots could all play, too.
While England were far from excellent, with John Stones a heart-in-mouth merchant and Wayne Rooney not what he once was, the home side were comfortably better than the Scots and proved it when Gary Cahill nodded home a Rooney corner.
Southgate will have to fail spectacularly if he is not to lead them to Russia, where the fun will really start.
They had played Three Lions over the Wembley PA to remind Southgate of the most tumultuous summer of his life at Euro 96.
But the aftermath of that penalty miss against Germany will seem like a stroll in the park compared to this gig.