Gareth Southgate is fighting a nonstop battle with English delusion

Welcome to the reckoning up. Global sport has spent much of the past two years in a state of jet lag, frazzled by bubbles and firebreaks, by dates that aren’t really dates, events that seem to be taking place in the wrong timeline. Well, here comes the centrepiece: Qatar 2022, the one non-negotiable, the fixed point around which this state of flux has revolved.

Check the watch in your pocket, still set to Standard Tournament Time, and it’s actually April. The World Cup is – cabin crew, seats for landing – less than two months away. And the lead-in kicks off this week with a round of Nations League fixtures, first steps towards a final in Doha on 18 December. At the end of which, red-eyed and jittery, the season is free to stumble back through arrivals and straight into the Christmas fixture list.

For England that run starts on Friday against Italy in Milan, followed by the visit of Germany to Wembley three days later. It is a delicious-looking double header and an unusually urgent prospect on two fronts. First, as the last chance to settle questions of personnel and tactics before a World Cup that many people, or at least many English people, seem to think Gareth Southgate’s team should be among the favourites to win.

And second this is the start of a wider reckoning-up for the age of Gareth. It has been six years now, stretched out around two tournaments, one of those a plastic, plague-ridden thing that began with a fudge and ended in a toxic hangover.

In that time the England team has been reimagined, over-lionised and elevated to unprecedented peaks of (non-trophy) achievement; but also dogged by a strange sense of rage and dissatisfaction. The next 12 weeks may just decide which way this thing is going to go.