Euro 2024 final - England vs Spain: Southgate: The heroically understated warrior on the verge of immortality

Can the England team and Three Lions boss Gareth Southgate make football history for all eternity here in Berlin later today

Happy Sonntag from here a sunny and humid Berlin,

Although after a 12 hour train journey on Saturday from Kings X via three changes all the way to Berlin in east Germany, I’m absolutely shattered.

However, despite feeling knackered (who knew you could feel seasick after a long day on rocking trains), I finally got off the train at Berlin’s shiny but imposing Hauptbanhof - all shiny steel and acres of glass - round the corner from this city’s beating heart.

Despite the clock nearing midnight, I decided to walk over to the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gates - two intimidating sites loaded with such dark history that we should never, ever forget.

I’m not sure if I got emotional at seeing such powerfully evocative sights, I think I felt more relief than anything, finally making it to Berlin, which symbolised the final of this memorable month long tournament that I had absolutely no expectation of reaching four long weeks ago.

Slightly overwhelmed (although it might have been more to do with the fact that I had studied A Level German history and understood that the Brandenburg Gates stood for so much evil) to be in its towering presence for the first time in more than 20 years was overpowering - but intoxicating at the same time.

While everyone must educate themselves about Germany’s terrible 20th century history - in fact I would ask that everyone take time to visit a concentration camp at least once in their lives to really learn more - we have to acknowledge that this country, and Berlin more than anywhere, has refused to sweep its dark history under a carpet called denial.

While no-one should be complacent, Germany has done a worthy job acknowledging its terrible past and offering memorials that shame those responsible, while honouring the victims.

So, while any visit to Berlin should - must - pay tribute to those who suffered, we can also recognise that this German city, more than any other in this strangely beguiling county in the 21st century, is also a vibrant, diverse, lively, progressive capital.

Which is why in the early hours of Sunday morning, outside arguably the country’s - and all our collective histories’ most loaded sites, not to mention elegant symbols of a reunified Germany - it wasn’t incongruous to watch merry England fans singing Bukayo Saka’s praises, while outnumbered Spanish supporters danced to music nearby.

And when another group of Three Lions fans sung under the shadow of the gates: ‘You can stick your Tapas up yer a***’, it was, somehow, smiles all round.

Gareth Southgate: The heroically understated warrior on the verge of immortality. CREDIT: OFFSIDE

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For All Eternity

I remember being in a bar in Lens, northern France in September 1998, a couple of months after Aime Jacquet’s diverse French side lifted the World Cup for the first time in its history, with a gloriously beautiful team I can still recount off the top of my head if you ask me over a pint.

Pride of place on the yellowing, nicotine stained wall in this unprepossessing pub, which also passed for a community hub, amid the dying coalfields in this curiously industrial part of France, hung a framed copy of the front page of French daily sports newspaper L’Equipe. It was dated the day after such a victory for the ages.

A picture of that immortal team celebrating moments after the final whistle accompanied the headline: ‘POUR L'ÉTERNITÉ’.

Can Gareth Southgate’s England side become immortal for all eternity later today here on a sunny Sunday in Berlin?

We’re about to find out.

Gareth Southgate: The heroically understated warrior on the verge of immortality. CREDIT: OFFSIDE

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Southgate: The heroically understated warrior on the verge of immortality 

Southgate’s methodical style of empathy and emotional intelligence has not so much offered the facet that has been missing among talented England sides of the past; quite the opposite.

He has removed the one thing that crippled previous teams at tournaments: fear.

We can all recall Three Lions’ forbears, where any incipient aspiration and positivity was forcibly removed by a relentlessly toxic air that fuelled the fear of failure and neurosis, by amplifying the thirst for success.

Juddering disappointment relative to soaring prior expectation

Southgate moved the dial to a land where it is important to keep talking, in a bid to avoid not showing up.

In fact Southgate has ‘completed’ this squad by taking away the debilitating sole issue that has weakened and worried exceptional players from the past.

This team is not scared to fail.

He has swatted away the toxic creep of uncertainty, and fear of underperformance, mired as it was, with the prospect and expectation of letting down an expectant nation.

And he’s done it all besieged within the eye of the storm, while his squad luxuriates in special pools, with special unicorns, and plays on special turf, hidden, or at least sheltered from the intense battering as the storm rages outside.

Taking noble ownership of consequences, ramifications and repercussions through honest communication. Stowing away his team while he steers clear of shipwrecks on his voyage. None more so than when I was present at his nadir this summer, in a sweaty, sweltering press room in Cologne, shortly after this dignified man had beer thrown all over him.

And while gargoyles such as Bild bemoan that his team were ‘moments away from returning to the island’, in their introductory paragraph in their pages the morning after England eclipsed Slovakia in Gelsenkirchen after a never-to-be-forgotten comeback as improbable as it was stirring, the only haven Southgate has created is a stress-free environment in sleepy Blankenheim.

If you’re always telling your team what to think, you’re not allowing them to feel

And Southgate wants them to feel, through a powerful resolve to establish a clinical reset from the divided galaxy far, far away where England bosses drank pints of wine and suggested impropriety. Allegedly.

Not only that but he has embodied the very essence of the drive to success. Slowly. Incrementally. Methodically. Habitually. Vindicating his leadership style in the process.

Quite simply, Southgate has underlined that there is no problem facing this England team there cannot be solved by a hug.

In Southgate’s understated, but teak tough aesthetic, hidden by self-deprecating pronouncements about his dog not being impressed with any achievements, past, present and pending - but acutely revealed when he has had to fight for his team, his squad, his job, and for the career he wants, and has already had - as we, and he, learn just how much brutal criticism he can endure, and is further capable of enduring.

The group stages being not so much a fantasia as chilling nightmare in which his life’s legacy was about to unravel in a thunderclap of mediocrity.

And even if we still remain unsure if previous tournaments achievements left scars, or success, intangible trophies or sad memorials, Southgate has put us at vaguely at ease over the thorny subject of what it means to be English amid grifters and liars, and charlatans and wasters during the General Election that ran alongside the dismal group stages.

Quite simply, as the song goes: ‘Southgate you’re the one.’

Never before has a throughly decent, quiet English (football) hero so deserved to finally seal his achievements with a trophy, as Southgate: the heroically understated warrior on the verge of immortality.

See you at the Olympiastadion tonight, where hopefully Fussbal es Kommt Nach Hause…

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