World Cup 2018: Russia and The Rise of the Nice Guy
How the tide of English football is pulling away from gruff ‘football men’ to a new breed. Of thinkers and feelers.
England 2018: a group of generally young, honest players that entertain their fans and win the games they’d be expected to.
Forgetting for a moment last night’s race to second place, if you’d travelled forward in time to this World Cup from the apocalyptic post-Euro 2016 scenes and read the above description — whilst simultaneously watching Jesse Lingard and his cheeky smile becoming one of the most talked-about names in your match-day local — you’d have been rubbing your eyes in disbelief.
Oh, and the Manager seems like a nice guy too.
Something very curious is happening with English football right now.
The FA’s marketing machine has been operating at full steam in the run up to and during the tournament, but there’s no denying that the winds of change are blowing calmly through England’s national game.
Upon the abrupt end to “Big” Sam Allardyce’s short tenure, the FA was left facing an embarrassing lack of available top quality candidates. Guardiola, Mourinho, Wenger were all gainfully employed by clubs with big budgets and better players, whilst the dearth of quality English managers at top-level clubs was a national embarrassment. Shorter still was the list of individuals who would have taken what has, since 1966, been a poisoned chalice.
So when the eventual appointment of Gareth Southgate was made, it was predictably put down to a lack of options.
Those options had always (always) included a pre-requisite within the media for ‘a winner’: someone who commands the respect of the players and is, at least in post-Capello England, English. Thoroughly English.
What that meant to a large collective sub-conscious was that their man had to be a ‘man’s man’. He definitely wasn’t meant to be nice — and neither for that measure were an overwhelming majority of his squad. Because pre-2018 England demanded 11 captains on the pitch. And they all needed to be ‘real men’ too.
Southgate was the steady, if unimaginative choice of the Football Association, in possession of a set of regulation England Official™ suits, presumably adequately pressed and perfectly spaced — receipts kept safely in a drawer just in case. There was simply no room for any skeletons in his closet.
This isn’t a sexy continental coach or a tub-thumping Engerlish gaffer, just a safe ex-international who already had one boot in the FA camp.
Many fans and writers alike bemoaned the vanilla appointment — an infamous clip of Southgate delivering a team-talk to the Under 21’s doing the rounds as a testament to his inability to deliver Churchillian speeches that would ready “our boys” for battle.
Team England is a place for warriors and patriotic speeches, never-say-die attitudes and we’ll-fight-them-on-the-battlefield rhetoric.
But the blood and bandages, up-and-at-em heroes of days-gone-by are quickly being forgotten in favour of this group of players and coaches who are happy to have fun, talk about their feelings and seemingly treat the biggest show on earth (sorry IOC) like a clean-cut Instagrammable city break.
Prior to the knockout rounds, England were approaching the stage that anyone who had witnessed English participation in a football tournament since 1990 would have been expecting the cold reality of (at best) a glorious defeat or (worse) a limp surrender at the hands of an opponent we really should be beating.
Either of these inevitable outcomes should typically be marred by the actions of at least one of the following: the referee; a tabloid villain in the opposing team; (and this, most criminally of all) one of our own.
However, this tournament — this squad — has a different feel to it.
This England posts videos of themselves racing inflatable unicorns in the hotel swimming pool.
Since Southgate’s appointment, we’ve seen quiet (if unspectacular) progress, culminating in England’s current position as darlings of the media. In fact, this England plays darts with those same journalists charged with documenting their progress at the tournament and who, in the past, have been more keen to act as vultures than friends. Perhaps most tellingly, this England hasn’t had any poorly constructed effigies of players strung up at your nearest pub. Most of the players themselves probably wouldn’t know what to order if they did find themselves in said establishment.
This is not your traditional working-man’s team. Not anymore.
Despite the best efforts of Panama and Columbia, this social-media-savvy England seemingly does not respond to violence with violence. Nor are they interested in emulating the petty antics we’ve seen from some at this World Cup (we’re looking at you Neymar). They simply get on with it. And yet no one is deriding them as unpatriotic or uncaring.
It seems that a new dawn is breaking over England, largely due to the work that Gareth Southgate and his team have done in opening the squad up to the media, and by default the fans.
The manager himself seems to listen when spoken to, acknowledging the presence of other human beings who might, on occasion, know more than him about certain topics. Emotional and intelligence were never words meant to be uttered in the essential / desirable requirements of your prospective England Manager’s CV.
However, with England 2018, passion or experience is no longer listed as one of the non-negotiable skills for this role. We now seem ok talking and reading about a coach who has done his homework and prepared meticulously.
Southgate even has the brass to use full sentences when answering questions. We were meant to be getting away from all this when Roy Hodgson was dispensed with after Euro 2016, to be replaced by the no-nonsense thunder of Allardyce. Sometimes going full circle has an upside.
In fact the characteristics of Gareth Southgate could just as easily be applied to Harry Kane, Harry Maguire, Jordan Pickford or Ruben Loftus-Cheek. Where are the ‘big personalities’ in this squad? Adams, Ince, Terry et al would not sit well on a unicorn.
So what’s changed? Why are we accepting of this new breed all of a sudden and does this adoption of the nice guys mean that we’re always destined to finish last?
We can perhaps look no further than society itself. Times are-a-changing. Those 30-something-and-up fans, used to disappointment brought about in following a team of stoic ‘man’s man’ players and coaches, were becoming apathetic.
If the FA wanted to keep fires for the national team burning, the dream needed selling to Millennial fans who simply have no time for watching gruff 50-somethings bark orders on the sideline while a team they can’t relate to, toil warrior-like on some foreign grass.
You only have to look at the way the FA decided to announce the Three Lions’ squad to see who’s imagination this team is really trying to capture. Would a Roy Hodgson press release or a Sam Allardyce / Fabio Capello press conference really have caught the attention of this new breed of fan in the same way?
It might be the first thing the FA has intentionally done right in generations.
The FA also got lucky that the man they appointed to such derision actually seems like a decent guy. In doing so they invested in a coach who, in the not-so-distant past, would have been regarded as a soft ‘laptop manager’ or an FA patsy. The quick and painless severing of chest thumpers like Wayne Rooney, Joe Hart and Jack Wilshere has buried that theory.
But maybe there’s something else at play here. Maybe we’re all just a bit tired of the same old ‘style’, if one may use that term to describe all that has gone before.
With the unstoppable rise of social media, this generation of fans is becoming more ‘woke’ as to the reality that we now live in an age where the accepted norm might not actually be the best way of doing things after all. In football terms it seems like we might finally be entering an age where it’s ok to be intelligent, and to have feelings. It’s also ok to be open about it too.
Danny Rose for one has recently opened up on his own struggle with depression last season. He has, thankfully, been neither derided as unfit to wear the shirt nor silently shooed into a corner. Instead Rose was commended for his bravery and has been publicly celebrated for having the courage to speak about his experiences. The English football public is listening where sections might once have turned away and sneered.
It seems that the England of 2018 is not only shifting the tide of how English football is viewed, they’re changing the underlying current of what it means to be a fan of England right now.
Both of these groups seem to be emerging as pretty nice guys.
