English football loved the assassin‑faced baby but what we are left with now is a fading pro, approaching his 31st birthdayIt has all seemed so joyless at times, with so many long, difficult periods when it has seemed like a black drape could be placed over the entire team it might surprise you to learn that when Gareth Southgate took his seat in the Stadion Stozice and set out his reasons for dropping Wayne Rooney it was seven years to the day since England had lost a qualifying fixture.It can seem almost a trick of the mind to remind yourself that England are unbeaten in all qualifiers since a 2009 defeat in Ukraine when Rob Green was sent off and, losing...
The caretaker manager did what he needed to do with Roberto Mancini in the crowd at what is surely the world’s least intimidating 90,000 national stadiumEnter, the temp-to-perm caretaker. On a subdued afternoon at Wembley, England kicked off their latest not‑quite dawn with a colourless 2-0 defeat of Malta that saw Gareth Southgate stand and fret and look convincing enough on the touchline in his first game as not-quite England manager.Southgate will be condemned by some for the general beigeness of the occasion. He is after all an England manager. This is what we do. But given the poverty of the opposition and the neck-cricking, one-sided nature of the match the idea that this was some kind of audition to...
England will have a third manager in three games at Wembley on Saturday – at least the latest man in the job can hardly fare worse than his immediate predecessor Sam Allardyce“Bring it on, lads,” Sam Allardyce exclaimed at a press conference three days after accepting the job of managing England. So they did. And 64 days later he was gone.The “lads” had wiped him out, turning him into a candidate for a spectacular entry in the Guinness World Records. Allardyce became the recipient of the largest amount of money ever paid to a man for supervising a single game of football: about £550,000 in salary over the two months, plus a reported £1m in “compensation” for £6m he had...
Swansea appoint former Team USA boss Bob Bradley. Plus: problems on and off the field for Coventry, and World Cup 2018 qualifying previewsSubscribe and review: iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, AcastOn this special international edition of Football Weekly Extra, AC Jimbo is joined by Barry Glendenning, James Horncastle and Paolo Bandini to fashion a pod out of … well, the following: Continue reading...
Gareth Southgate should have taken radical action over England captaincy, Hal Robson-Kanu may be needed by Wales and how long can Didier Deschamps do without Karim Benzema?Captaincy is among the biggest red herrings in football: all players are supposed to set examples with their performances and leaders lead with or without an armband. And yet the England captaincy matters simply because a lot of people think it matters. Steven Gerrard was upset when it was taken off him by a caretaker manager, Stuart Pearce, and David Beckham was uplifted when it was given to him by a caretaker manager, Peter Taylor. The country’s latest caretaker manager, Gareth Southgate, should have de-fetishised the armband by announcing England do not need a...