Klopp or Guardiola for England is ‘bonkers’ as Southgate ‘takes bullet’ for Kane

Editor F365
Jurgen Klopp, Gareth Southgate and Pep Guardiola with the England badge
Would Pep Guardiola or Jurgen Klopp do a better job as England manager than Gareth Southgate?

Jurgen Klopp as England manager is a ‘bonkers’ idea, while the inquest continues on Gareth Southgate and Harry Kane.

Send your views on England to theeditor@football365.com

 

Imagine the boiled p***
Oh, go on, let it be Sarina Wiegman, if for no other reason than that it’d annoy the shit out of all the right people.
Chris Bridgeman, Kingston upon Thames

 

Klopp or Guardiola? That’s just bonkers
While Southgate has resigned we still need to understand what worked and went wrong or we risk repeating the same things. In berating Southgate many seem to forget the shambles before he took on the role and the challenge England had qualifying for tournaments, let alone get out of a group stage. Southgate made it look easy.

His Goto strategy was 4-3-3 during the qualifying campaign, which works against the lower-ranked teams and the odds of qualifying over the 10 or 12 games. But he changed it for tournaments – sometimes due to injuries but mostly due to rethinking what it takes to progress through what are a series of one off game. Being more defensive – on average – is more likely to work than being randomly attacking. Sure teams like Türkiye or Georgia or Hungary ,at the last World Cup, can light up the tournament with some attacking displays – but they aren’t going to win. On the other hand the Greek and Portuguese teams of a few years ago did win by being dour and defensive.

But deciding to change the strategy and formation used over a two-year period for something different going into the tournament ends up making the team look and behave disorganized and unbalanced as players attempt to work out what they need to do.

The idea we will get a Klopp or Guardiola, etc, is absolutely bonkers. Managers like Mourinho and Conte are dependent on the players bought and brought in to fill specific roles. And yes, Klopp would certainly bring the love, keep the team feeling great about playing for England and be happy to work with whomever is at his disposal but how successful would he be when his ideas took quite a while to be effective at Liverpool?

The other idea of creating a common playing style in England so that players can come into the team understanding what they were doing is equally bonkers. Sure, the German FA talked about this – but it was high level concepts and they could only force this across the various national age group teams, which England has already done. The top-level teams are so dependent on their team strategy as a way to beat opponents, they aren’t going to allow the FA, who are so far from the state-of-the-art football strategists, to dictate the way they play.

Do you think Nagelsmann, when managing club sides would have gone along with this? Darn right he wouldn’t. So why would Arteta, Guardiola, even the Klopp’s replacement, Slot, change his ideas – for England. Why would they go out of their way to find an ideal manager based on strategy and tactics only to say, don’t worry about all that?

This Spain team were different than many previous winners, including their own past winning teams. They were pro-risk, wiling to play balls in front of their team mates for quick transitions. There were one or two occasions when they were pushed back – Germany in second half and England second half for a short while – but they kept trying to play the same way and it paid off.

Their team was balanced – even if it meant a supposedly poorer player having to step in for an injury, player receiving bookings etc.

Whomever takes over England has to use a consistent strategy across all games – friendlies, qualifying campaigns and tournaments. Put round pegs into round holes, even if there is a superior triangle out there who just doesn’t fit round or square holes.

They also need to be strong enough to say it may mean a Kane, Bellingham or Foden, for example, doesn’t fit or they all can’t play together. A team of great individuals may win out quite a few times – as England did – but it’s not a plan to succeed.

But back to Southgate and qualifying. The next Euros are in the UK and Ireland and the FA decided we should go through qualifying and not receive automatic entry. Perhaps because of the damage caused to your ranking points and, therefore the pot drawn for the finals, perhaps because friendlies aren’t great money makers, perhaps because they were being kind to the other home nations or, perhaps, because Southgate has made it look so easy.

The FA are so ineffective, not representative of the country and certain not the senior teams that play for England, and always happy to see the manager take the fall. Hopefully they haven’t created another banana skin.
Paul McDevitt

MORE ON ENGLAND FROM F365
👉 Kane warned Southgate over England squad ‘worry’ as ‘overpowering’ star got ‘preferential treatment’
👉 Five England players who might be relieved to see the back of Gareth Southgate
👉 Southgate rescued the FA from themselves after Allardyce; England need better plan than Hoddle this time

 

Mancini makes more sense
Can I remind people that before Southgate we were planning on having Allardyce? Don’t be surprised if we end up with something similar.

I hope people start to understand that international management has almost nothing to do with club management.

Both Southgate and Luis de la Fuente came up through the youth teams, with almost no club management experience.

If you want a successful international manager you should look at successful international managers.

Now there’s one that stands out who is Roberto Mancini. He won with Italy, won the Coppa Italia multiple times and won the FA Cup and Premier League for the newly monied Man City. So he’s both a successful international manager and has worked in England.

He’s stuck with Saudi Arabia til 2027, but would be a perfect manager for us given the amount of money we throw at it.
Ian, LFC, Belgium

 

Gareth in perspective
Compare Gareth Southgate’s record to the England performances in major tournaments since 1966 (and before if you like) – decades of underachievement, mismanagement, mental weakness, arrogance, stupidity and abject failure – and it looks excellent.

Compare it to the other major footballing nations and it doesn’t look quite so impressive. Despite most of them also missing out on, or flopping in, the occasional tournament, regular semi-finals and finals are the norm for pretty much all of the major footballing nations over the last 60 years or so. All of them with actual trophies to show for it.

So effectively what Southgate achieved was to stop England being consistently shit in tournaments. Well thanks for stopping us being perma-shit Gareth – although many individual performances could still be described thus – and thanks for realising you had hit your glass ceiling and taken England as far as you could. Hopefully someone just as good at team building and team spirit but more tactically astute and less cautious can now pick up the mantle and turn us into winners.
Kevin Villa (Just seen Walker made the Team of the Tournament, selected by UEFA’s “Technical Observer Panel”. Presumably consisting of Mr Magoo, Stevie Wonder, Helen Keller and Geoff Thomas. Technical you say. Technical. Rarely has my mind boggled this much)

 

Succession?
Great line from Matt Stead: ‘. . . the FA appointed Sam Allardyce and, to their apparent shock, got Sam Allardyce.’

Unfortunately, that’s as good as it got for an article that seemed to be structured around three misconceptions:

1) It’s the right thing to volunteer – it’s really not; I would much rather Rishi Sunak hadn’t volunteered to be our Prime Minister, for example. Sometimes you need to know what you’re good at and what you’re likely to screw up. I’d even say it’s an odd sort of arrogance to put your hand up for something you can’t really deliver on.

2) The FA should have had a succession plan – I used to work in recruitment so this really hit a nerve; what even is a succession plan apart from a list of names? And in an industry like football the identity of those names is known to everyone; what more could the FA have done while Hodgson was in post that would have put them in a better position to find his successor?

3) The FA have always hired poorly – I can’t stand the FA so it sticks in my craw to defend them on this point, but actually a lot of their appointments have made perfect sense at the time they made them. Not all, I grant you. Appointing a man who took Middlesbrough from 13th to 12th was particularly odd, but the likes of Keegan, Hoddle, Capello, even Allardyce were not totally bonkers appointments even if subsequent events make them seem so.

Anyway, that’s my two penn’orth.
Matt Pitt

 

Southgate took the bullet for Kane
If you happen to watch HBO’s House of the Dragon, a severed dragon’s head was recently paraded around town as a sort of marker of victory’s spoils following a pivotal battle won. But in the show it was implied that upon seeing it, much of the village folk were less than impressed, and that a dead dragon was perhaps portent only for unwelcome future ills.

I wondered myself this week whether much of F365’s mailbox sentiment equates to Southgate’s head being paraded about, and whether it was the nastiest voices (such as mine, maybe) which were truly the most representative, or carried furthest and loudest. In any event there’s little doubt in my mind the larger court of public opinion played no minor part in Southgate’s thought process this week, and I believe this mailbox remains an often raw but very good cross section of public footballing opinion.

Recognizing all this, the saddest thing about both the Euros misery and Southgate’s resignation is that Harry Kane had utterly massive parts to play in both, yet it is Southgate’s head that rolls.

There is little doubt Southgate erred wedding his loyalty and belief to this striker, who essentially cost him what remaining goodwill he had. Kane played every Euros match like the NFL placekicker he (comically) hopes to become, static and upright, requiring perfect, pinpoint service to feet in a huge pocket of unadulterated space, hoping to dispatch his strike in a 6-8 yard vacuum with not so much as a butterfly’s fart anywhere near his boots. If anyone’s head should’ve been paraded about this week it was Harry Kane’s.
Eric, Los Angeles CA

MORE ON ENGLAND FROM F365
👉 Kane warned Southgate over England squad ‘worry’ as ‘overpowering’ star got ‘preferential treatment’
👉 Five England players who might be relieved to see the back of Gareth Southgate
👉 Southgate rescued the FA from themselves after Allardyce; England need better plan than Hoddle this time

 

Anyone?
By the way, where are all those people who said the terrible football resulting in grinding out of results was worth it…
Badwolf