"Will the FA be looking for someone with Gareth Southgate's values?"
It was a question that cut through the warm air in the tent where I was giving a talk on Sunday and cut to the core of the Football Association’s search for the next England manager. “Will the FA be looking for someone with Gareth Southgate’s values?”
I’d just finished delivering some reflections about “the England football team and World War Two” at the We Have Ways Festival next to Silverstone. Outside was an impressive array of WW2 tanks and guns – “Blastonbury” my son calls it – thousands of festival goers and a platoon of historians like the organisers, James Holland and Al Murray,
I’m no historian, as any of my exhausted old teachers will confirm, but I could speak about visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau with Wayne Rooney at Euro 2012 and interviewing the late, great Sir Tom Finney and trying to get him to open up on his bravery with the Eighth Army. Sir Tom was too modest and also still too mournful about those he left behind in Italy. I also touched on how Southgate took the England squad training with the Marines. No phones! No masseurs! Just mud and bonding.
I was on stage with Tony Pastor, co-founder of Goalhanger, the wildly successful podcast company, and we’d moved into the Q&A section. Amongst the very detailed responses from the floor was this thoughtful enquiry about the identity of the 20th England manager (including caretakers). Should he share Southgate’s values? Was it just about winning? Southgate’s dignity in adversity has long struck a chord with the nation. His role, his work, was viewed more than a sporting managerial assignment. His values mattered.