Gareth Southgate, England’s most polarising figure, is ‘just sticking to football’ | Barney Ronay

The manager has publicly backed down on inclusivity and social issues: unsurprising in a sport that left him nowhere to go

There was something oddly gripping this week about re-entering the distinct and self-contained narrative world of the Gareth Southgate England press conference.

These are the kind of events that disappear completely from the memory in between times. But one glimpse of that stern, avian profile frowning dutifully in front of a board covered with adverts and you’re hurled back instantly into a wholly realised place of tortured moral compromise, of penitent tactical self-justification, all of it ringed off-stage by the massed buttock-launching rocket assaults of English discontent.