Fawning English pundits blindsided by Gareth Southgate must realise boss is poster boy of abject failure – Keith Jackson

Geoff Hurst led the case for the defence when he insisted that it’s an ‘easy’ decision for the FA to keep Gareth Southgate in charge of England’s national team.

And, really, who are we to argue with a World Cup winner, a hero of 1966 and a Knight of the Realm? No Sir, now that the great man has spoken then surely the issue can be safely put to bed, all wrapped up in a freshly ironed pair of Southgate’s stripy button hole pyjamas. You just know he wears them too, right?

Slipping between the sheets dressed in any other manner would feel, frankly, far too risky. Leave all that macho nudity to roguish, reckless European types like the Italians and the Spaniards. It’s not for our Gareth. And let’s use the word ‘our’ in the most sincere sense because all of Scotland owes this man a debt of gratitude after another tournament gone spectacularly wrong for our nearest and dearest neighbours.

If Southgate wasn’t such a stickler for applying the old belt-and-braces, safety-at-all-costs approach to managing England then the Tartan Army’s fundamentalists would have gone into hiding some time ago, so traumatic would the experience of sharing a border have become. They’d have built a statue to the man by now had he delivered even half of what he ought to have done over the course of these last eight years.

With the almost limitless supply of raw talent he’s had to pick from over that time Southgate should have been piling up trophies rather than amassing memories of how close he came to ending England’s years of hurt. It’s almost six decades now since Hurst’s ‘hat-trick’ against West Germany at Wembley and there have been various moments throughout those 58 years when they have failed to punch their proper weight on the world stage.

Fro