What did England do wrong against Spain? And should Gareth Southgate stay or go? Our expert panel casts an eye over the Euro 2024 final.
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00:00Jason brought up Graham Potter briefly there, and I suppose there's a theme in that. What
00:03Gareth Southgate has done, rather rightly or wrongly, is to sort of set up a bit of a tactical
00:08culture and a playing style with England, this sort of quite cautious possession-based playing
00:12style. It sort of all ties in with what the FA wanted to do from a technical direction when
00:18they appointed him eight years ago. Do you think that England are going in the right direction with
00:22how things are now, or should they be doing things differently from a strategic point of view?
00:26Should they get a Graham Potter in someone who likes to play a broadly similar kind of style,
00:30or should they be looking at someone who rips that up and does things very different?
00:35I think Graham Potter would be a fairly sensible shout. I think he's, obviously,
00:39there's a reason he's been out of football for a year, and he seems to have had a lot of
00:43opportunities. He was linked with Leicester, he was linked with, I think, Roma, Ajax. He seems
00:49to have kept himself very quiet, which has always made me kind of suspect he's waiting
00:56for the opportunity to have the England job. It's a hell of a bold strategy with your career,
01:00isn't it? I'm just going to sit unemployed for a year in case the very best job possible comes up.
01:04Yeah, but I think, in a way, he's probably, unless there's a big club coming up, he probably needs,
01:10he's had a year's break as well, hasn't he, from the Chelsea job, which didn't go the way he wanted.
01:16I think, before the 2022 World Cup, everybody seemed to be very much wanting Graham Potter,
01:22and then the Chelsea job's kind of damaged his stock a little bit. But that can happen to a lot
01:27of managers with Chelsea, especially how they've been the last few years. But I think he plays
01:34nice football overall. I think he'd be able to develop a lot of the players, coaching-wise,
01:38did that at Brighton. So I think it would make sense to go for somebody like that, I think.
01:45I suppose we are getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, given at the time of recording,
01:48Gareth Southgate hasn't actually given any proper indications as to whether he'll
01:52step down or not. But I suppose one thing I did want to ask about Jason was the foundations that
01:56he's laying, because he has made a big difference in terms of changing the culture, both in the
02:02playing squad and even in terms of relationship between the team and the media. And I think
02:07there's a lot of advancements he's made in terms of setting the baseline for what England can be,
02:13how good they are at major tournaments, how they prepare for major tournaments.
02:16Do you think he's giving a really strong foundation for the next manager, or do you
02:20think we're looking at someone who will want to change things? Is there anything that needs to
02:25be tweaked on that kind of baseline? I think he's definitely leaving a good
02:30foundation, isn't he? I mean, think about where England were at when he took the job.
02:34Obviously, the aftermath of the Euro 2016, that defeat against Iceland, just
02:40chaos, wasn't it? Absolute carnage, so despondent. And whoever potentially succeeds him, if he does
02:47go, is going to be taken over a team who, regardless of the way that they got there,
02:52have now been to two major finals in three years, have been in three semifinals in four tournaments.
03:00There's definitely a good foundation here. And part of that as well is the crop of players
03:06that they would be inheriting from him. There are so many wonderful players in the squad,
03:14but I think that the most important thing is the change in, obviously, you use the word culture,
03:20but I think as well, it's a change in belief. England now look as if they believe and expect
03:26that they should be reaching the last stages of tournaments, time after time after time.
03:31And that's something that just wasn't the case prior to Southgate. You know, so I do think,
03:35obviously, there are things that need change. And I think those things will need change. And
03:39regardless of if Southgate leaves or not, even if he stays, things are going to need to change
03:43if England are ever to lift a trophy again. But certainly, the broad brushstrokes of what
03:52is already there is much more positive than it was this time eight years ago.