Gareth has shown moral and football cowardice – for the first time, we’re a bit Southgate Out

We consider ourselves to have been broadly pro-Southgate here over the last few years.

He’s led England to their two best major tournament efforts in 50-odd years and if that speaks as much for England’s historic mediocrity as Southgate’s quality it’s still notable and creditable. Occasional and legitimate grumbles about the inherent conservatism of his tactics were generally more than outweighed by the tangible and intangible improvements England made under his pleasant-uncle style of waistcoat-clad leadership.

The tangible were only a second ever World Cup semi-final outside England and a first ever trip to the European Championship final. The intangible a fostering of a clear, club-style spirit within the England set-up where the Liverpool or United or Arsenal or Chelsea cliques of past squads were eliminated and on international duty all such club squabbles were put cleanly to one side.

Southgate’s England has been a team that clearly enjoy playing with and for each other and that is not something to be taken for granted among players generally drawn from a handful of clubs who spend most of the time in direct and brutal competition.

Again, this was not without its downsides. The generally positive trait of loyalty – Southgate is certainly a man who, to borrow a philosophy from the England cricket set-up, would rather give a player one game too many to justify themselves than one game too few – has at times been desperately close to blind loyalty.

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There’s an irony in there. The removal of the club cliques within Team England has perhaps led to the formation of one giant Team England clique where your club background is irrelevant as long as you’ve got 50 caps.

The latest squad highlighted these problems. Southgate attracted some criticism for standing by Harry Maguire, but here at least his hands were tied. Slightly self-tied due to previous standing by of the Manchester United spare part, but still. Injuries to others in that position left Maguire the only meaningfully experienced international centre-back Southgate could call on, so call on him he did.

Southgate’s blind spot on Jordan Henderson, though, is far harder to stomach. Southgate, like Henderson, has built so much of his reputation on doing not just the best thing for football reasons but the right one for moral reasons. He, like Henderson, is an intelligent and thoughtful sort which is what makes it all the more annoying to see him seemingly oblivious to the backlash around selecting Henderson in his current situation.

It’s damningly and doubly infuriating for being the wrong decision whichever way you wish to look at it. Unlike with Maguire, there was no shortage of alternative options available to Southgate in central midfield, with a wide range of players performing slightly different versions of the role splendidly at the start of this season.

A semi-retired, money-counting Henderson had no business in this squad on football merit now he is outside top-level football, and that’s without even considering the intense sense of betrayal several fans’ groups feel about a man who doubled-down on that betrayal this week by massively insulting their, our, and everyone else’s intelligence on why he’s done it.

We don’t think Henderson is stupid enough to believe his own bullshit about his motivations for heading to Saudi Arabia for obscene (in every way) money, and thus the only conclusion is that he thinks the rest of us are.

And now Southgate’s name can be added to that list. Picking Henderson against Ukraine was footballing and moral cowardice.

James Ward-Prowse has been one of the Premier League’s standout players in one of its standout teams in the early weeks of the season and could not even get into the squad.

James Maddison has been perhaps the best player in the entire league across the first month, running games for his new team from an ACM role in front of two tough and technical midfield players.

That Southgate could watch this unfold and conclude that Maddison could only be deployed on the left side of attack against a team of Ukraine’s limitations having cheerfully bossed games against Premier League opponents from deeper is maddening.

Ukraine were not opponents that necessitated Henderson deployment even if all else were equal. Declan Rice and Jude Bellingham are both magnificent midfielders in fine form of their own; deploying Maddison in a midfield three would have instantly made England a more threatening and coherent side without taking any undue risks with solidity. It would have allowed Maddison to perform the role he has performed this season with such success at Spurs, allowed a more natural left-sided attacker such as Marcus Rashford a spot in the team and avoided the problem England ran into time and again of Maddison and Kane trying to occupy the same space.

The idea that Kane should only ever play in the 18-yard box or “within the width of the posts” has always been fallacious. That it still gains such traction after a year in which he combined playmaker and central striker roles for Spurs and scored 30 league goals is startling really, and that his work in creating England’s equaliser still won’t silence the nonsense tells us that a great many people are a lost cause on this one.

Southgate, at least, is not among those. He knows and is happy to accommodate Kane’s roamings because they are so very often so very effective. But they are more so when you maximise the number of other attacking players on the pitch able to get alongside and ahead of him when those moments come.

There was no need for Henderson here, and that would have been true even were he still at Liverpool.

Add in the rest of it, though, and there’s a sense of a significant misstep and misjudgement from Southgate. There are plenty already weary of his safety-first instincts and the credit in the bank will quickly dissipate.

There is a nagging sense of diminishing returns with Southgate’s England and increasingly a sense that this very exciting group of players could do more with a more progressive coach given their great strengths exist in the midfield and attacking positions.

We can’t deny the whole Henderson unpleasantness has coloured our thinking here, or the fact we’re hopelessly all-in on Angeball and ready to get hurt again. But watching a fine group of midfield and attacking talents thrive under a progressive coach at Spurs and watching an even better group of midfield and attacking talents stagnate and misfire for England gives us pause.

The result in Wroclaw was objectively fine. It maintains England’s control of a group they took charge of with an away win in Italy which we definitely shouldn’t completely forget. But this was an England performance less than the sum of its parts, a team with the handbrake on where it wasn’t necessary and worse than that an England team that for the first time made us a bit queasy about Southgate as a man rather than just a coach.

And now, for the first time, we think we might be just a little bit Southgate Out.