Gareth Southgate is damned either way but England have tools to attack

T here is a nice note of circularity about the re-emergence of Roy Hodgson, English football’s own courtly blazered grail knight, in the same week that Gareth Southgate sets off on what will surely be his own final story cycle as England manager.

Hodgson is of course Southgate’s de facto predecessor in the job, setting aside the one-game Sam Allardyce interlude, which feels more than ever like the managerial equivalent of a half-remembered lost weekend on a Norwegian booze ferry. As England prepare for the double-header against Italy in Naples and Ukraine at Wembley, first steps on the gentle downhill slope towards Germany 2024, it is worth remembering just how lost they were back then.

Which was, to be clear, very lost indeed. Hodgson’s own time did at least provide some variation, veering between the slow-burn humiliation of Kyiv 2012, the more vivid and sustained humiliation of Brazil 2014, through to the generational humiliation of Nice two years later, Hodgson emerging for his final bow looking like a casino floor roué still dressed in last night’s tuxedo, the weight of a half-imagined sporting empire on his sagging shoulders.

It is worth remembering all this, if only because the journey from there to here has been a little undervalued. If Southgate makes it to Germany he will become the first proper England manager to take the team to four proper tournaments.

Walter Winterbottom lasted four World Cups, but he was more a kind of house master figure, cooking dinner and doing the washing up, taking the players to the opera. Sven-Göran Eriksson got three tournaments, Bobby Robson three and Alf Ramsey three in less congested times (the internet will tell you Ramsey also reached the quarter-finals of Euro 72 but in