The fact remains that front-loading a prefab sense of shared habits, team cultures and all the rest may not actually have much to do with winning football matches
The poet, librarian and attic-bound misanthrope Philip Larkin was asked once why he didn’t cash in on his bicycle-clipped celebrity by touring England giving speeches and milking the fame circuit like his contemporary, handsome, leather-jacketed Ted Hughes. Larkin’s response was to shrug and wince a little and point out that he just couldn’t face the idea of “going around pretending to be me”.
It is a phrase that always seems to lurk in the background whenever Gareth Southgate or anyone else at the FA talks about the need to discover and implement an English football “identity”. The same goes for DNA, culture, philosophy or any of the textural buzzwords banded about the place, largely unchallenged, by the Dan Ashworth-led coaching set at St George’s Park. Here they come, England’s burdened, mannered ambassadors of identity, chased on to the pitch by their own invisible shadows, going about the place pretending to be themselves.
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