Daily Mail sportswriter Martin Samuel is one of my heroes in this business. This morning, however, he had me scratching my head.
Seven days ago, his Mail column included a segment beneath this headline:
Why do the FA want to tie down Gareth Southgate for the next Euros now?
Today’s column, meanwhile, starts…
Gareth Southgate is the best thing to happen to English football in decades
There follows a tribute so fulsome that the England manager’s PR officer would struggle to outdo it.
And I agree with every word. If we leave Euro 2020 with nothing, it will not alter the fact that Southgate, in his five years in the hot seat, has overseen England’s greatest triumph since its sole World Cup.
He has ruled a thick, black line beneath a July day of 55 years ago and created a culture of the here and now amongst a group of young men who couldn’t give a damn about 1966.
It is ancient history. You might as well try and gee up Harry Kane & Co with tales of Agincourt. They play for the present, gloriously unsaddled by the past.
Look at their body language. No ghosts shadow these men. No inner voices undermine them. No hexes, no here-we-go-agains, no thirty years of hurt mantras gnawing at the soul. This England is Norman Bates, minus his mother.
They were a week ago. They still are today. So in seven days, what on earth can have transported Samuel from a place where he’s urging the FA to kick Southgate’s tyres a little longer, to a place where he’s hailing the England manager as a Moses for our time?
Oh, of course. England has won two more games than it had this time last week. One of them an exorcism, the other a borderline rout.
I don’t know if former NFL coach Tony Dungy has any time for our version of football, but I suspect a knowing smile would cross his face were you to put Samuels’ conflicting columns in front of him.
For it was Dungy, interviewed in his time as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ play-caller, who exposed the relationship between a coach and his audience as being shallower than a teenage crush.
“If you’re real demonstrative and you win, you’re a motivator. If you’re real demonstrative and you lose, you’re too uptight. If you’re laid-back and win, you’re a players coach. If you’re laid-back and you lose, you’re not disciplined enough.
“The bottom line is, you’ve got to win. If you win, what you’re doing is right. If you lose, what you’re doing is wrong.”
Proof of this from an English viewpoint could be just days away, of course. If Southgate leads his team to the European championship, he can spend his next five internationals in full greasepaint, if he wishes, driving round and round his technical area in a clown car, and no-one will bat an eyelid.
Take a knee? The man could take a leak against the opposition dugout and excuses would be found for him. Nor would they have to be particularly elaborate to satisfy his besotted public.
“Well, he’s a maverick, isn’t he? If that’s what it takes…”
If this doesn’t say much for our inclination to look after much more than Number One, though, what does it say for the future of sports journalism?
When wins are the only story that matters, to the extent that just two of them can turn a senior journalist from Doubting Thomas into Billy Graham, why should we care to read about a coach’s preferred formation, lucky colour or how driven he/she is by having been bullied at school?
Suddenly, it all looks like pointless gossip.
I don’t say Samuel’s volte-face threatens the medium but he shouldn’t be too surprised if even some of his biggest fans change the habit of a lifetime and start reading their newspapers from the front page backwards.
Taking a Pen. - thoughts of a small-time sports writer 