THE TWO CONTENDERS to become: “The Most-Powerful Man on the Planet” are respectively, 81 and 78 years of age. In that case, Gareth Southgate, who has, aged 53, just resigned as England Team Manager is a babe-in-arms.
He must now, however, make perhaps the hardest decision he will ever have to – what to do next. Being England Manager is often portrayed as: “The Impossible Job” - England Expects nothing less than world domination from whoever is in charge of the national football team and regardless of how well Southgate has done, not least in getting the team to successive European Championship finals, at the end of the day – he didn't bring Football home.
Might he return of club management? Perhaps, but, he doesn't have a good track record in a branch of team management where, if the weight of expectation is not as great as on whoever has the England job, the pressures to succeed are just as great, while the work-load is greater.
Southgate is seen as so essentially English, he is unlikely to be recruited to a non-English team, while, in his domestic game, the current fashion is for clubs to recruit managers of Head Coaches from beyond these shores. So, a return to club management might be a long shot.
He could well find his future in the television studio, where his experience, knowledge and his calm demeanour ought to make him a sought-after figure. But, such is the world of sport as television entertainment these days, the fact that he is seen as an uncontroversial figure would appear to go against him.
Television pundits have to be controversial, angry even and Gary Lineker rules unchallenged as football's benign older uncle.
I could actually see Southgate forging a career as the conscience of the game, a role which has been vacant since Jimmy Hill vanished from the television screens, but, the sort of calm analysis which Hill brought, particularly during his Sunday morning days on Sky is out of fashion these days.
He will, of course, write his memoirs and should do well from this, while, if the Football Association was more about stewardship of the whole game and less about Premiership politics, he could well become an influential elder statesman in the game's corridors of power.
Whatever happens, he has done a good job, in a role which is well-nigh impossible and I wish him well in the future.
I HAVE LONG been calling for root and branch reform of the Laws of the Game. Watching events in Germany in recent weeks, I am more than ever convinced, IFAB (The International Football Associations Board) really has to give itself a shake and get this done as a matter of urgency.
It seems to be a failing of the guardians of every sport that, in these days of television coverage and sport as a branch of the entertainment business, that players are allowed to bend to the point of breakage, rules which were put in place years ago to ensure fair play.
Rugby Union, for instance, has the abomination of the modern-day scrum, where no scrum-half feeds the ball in straight, as the Laws require, but, referees have been instructed to ignore this blatant form of cheating.
Football's equivalent of this is perhaps the approach to jersey-pulling and jostling at corner kicks and free kicks into the penalty area. Referees wag fingers and issue warnings, they will quite happily award the defending side a clearing free kick, but, they rarely award a penalty when an attacker is taken out.
I must admit, I admire the way American Football handles its cases of all-in wrestling at the line of scrimmage – where they look at the TV pictures, then decide which of the two teams has commited the greater number of fouls, before awarding the penalty to the opposition. There's something to be said for bringing that degree of common sense into football.
To be fair to IFAB and the other governing bodies, they got it right when they brought in this new rule that only the Captain can speak to the Referee. It will perhaps take most of the new season (assuming this move makes it into the domestic game) for the players to learn to shut-up and leave it to their Captain, but, hopefully we have seen the last of the poor match official being hounded by entire teams after he has given a decision against them.
This, only the Captain speaks rule, has come from Rugby Union. Another couple of rules Football might well borrow from the Hooligan's game might be:
Bring in the rule whereby the issuing of a yellow card sees the recipient go off the park for ten minutes.
Bring-in the team warning: whereby, if one team gives away a stream of consecutive fouls, particularly in defence, a general warning is issued: next foul, the perpetrator goes off for ten minutes.
I should say here, I have my concerns about the ten minute yellow card in football, perhaps there is a case for, as happens in ice hockey, having minor or major fouls, with a sliding scale of time off the pitch sanctions.
Another thing I would like to see coming in is a law whereby, once a team has taken the ball into the opposition's half, they cannot retreat back into their own half. In Germany there were too-many boring games in which one or at times both teams spent more time passing the ball backwards than forwards.
Keepball seems to be the current fashion, but, passing for passing's sake and not having a go at goal is the surest way of turning-off the fans – they want to see goalmouth action, not boring passing movements in the ten metres either side of half-way.
Watching England play in the knock-out stages of the Euros, I was struck at how often they would send the ball wide, only to then come back in on themselves and, very-often go right back into their own half to start again.
For the first decade and more after World War II, England probably had at their disposal the two best wide men in world football: future knights of the realm Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney (pictured). They wasted a lot of years giving the number seven jersey to one or the other, before realising, Finney's versatility meant he could play on the left and they could get both into the team.
Scotland had a similar situation with Rangers' Willie Waddell and Hibernian's Gordon Smith, but, putting both into the same Scotland team was a step too far for the SFA.
The spiritual successors to Matthews and Finney and Waddell and Smith were oor ain Willie Henderson and Jimmy Johnstone, but, only once did we play both of these wonderful wingers in the same Scotland team.
That sextet, arguablyly six of the ten best wingers ever in British football all shared the same first instinct – to get past their marker, hit the bye-line and either fire in a telling cross, or cut the ball back to a supporting midfield runner.
In the Euros, Bukayo Saka, in match after match, would get the ball in a good position, but, instead of beating his marker on the outside and either crossing or cutting the ball back, he would come back inside onto his favoured left foot and, although he did score one excellent goal, time and again he was crowded out.
That's another thing, Saka has been in the Arsenal set-up, the Academy and the main squad for 15 years; he is fast-approaching 50 England caps, but, as was clear in the Euros, he is, like so-many of today's supposed top stars, ridiculously “one-footed” - his right foot seems to be for standing on. What the Hell do they teach them at these big club academies?
I watched the Scotland v Serbia Women's international from Firhill on Tuesday night. Scotland had two wingers who were prepared to take on their markers and hit the bye-line, a tactic which produced the only goal of the game, plus several other near things. If the women can do it, why cannot the men.
By the way, although I was delighted to see Scotland win, I thought the Serbian girls were technically the better players, more comfortable on the ball. I also thought our girls, like British male teams, were over-reliant on passing backwards and sideways. I must have missed the memo: “thou shalt not make upfield progress.”
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