Southgate’s contract expires in December, an enlightened piece of timing that means a decision on his future, whether he will lead England into the next World Cup, does not have to be taken in the emotionally heightened circumstances of the immediate aftermath of the Euros. The sense of stability is unprecedented in English football; the contrast to what is going on in British politics unavoidable. Barring something remarkable between now and the election on 4 July, Southgate will have been manager under five different prime ministers — and he missed David Cameron by only a couple of months. Even Alf Ramsey, who spent more than a decade in the job, only got through four. 

But perhaps the inversion makes sense as politics has become increasingly footballised. As Westminster has become characterised by hyper-partisanship, leaders playing to their base with outrageous claims and demands for a change at the top as a panacea to any ill, so the England manager has become increasingly statesmanlike. 

And yet, it is precisely because of Southgate’s achievements that there is pressure, precisely because he has been there for so long that there is some impatience. If England can’t win something now, then when will they ever break the drought that has endured since 1966? Since the 2018 World Cup, the narrative has shifted: Southgate is no longer the waistcoated magus, conjuring remarkable performances from an unexceptional squad; he is the dull bureaucrat holding back a generation of unprecedented creative talent. Perhaps a Keir Starmer parallel is a stretch, but sometimes the country just needs a refreshing dose of dullness.

The boring truth, as ever, lies somewhere between the two extremes. Southgate’s three unexceptional years in charge of Middlesbrough — which ended in relegation — would never have been enough to have made him a serious candidate for the England job in normal times. But in the context of Sam Allardyce having been forced out just 69 days after his arrival by the Telegraph’s underwhelming sting — which revealed nothing more than his willingness to accept huge sums of money to give speeches overseas and to offer advice to agents seeking to comply with the Premier League’s third-party contract regulations — England just needed somebody available and uncontroversial.

Southgate had been England’s Under-21 manager and was working with the FA on its various development programmes — making him at least partially responsible for the glut of attacking talent he is now supposedly restricting. He never sought the top job, rather it was thrust upon him. As he led England through qualification and then to the semi-final of the 2018 World Cup, there was a sense of him as a Richard Hannay figure, an accidental hero. Set against the chaotic backdrop of the Brexit negotiations, Southgate seemed an old-fashioned English hero, modest and decent in his waistcoat, his strength nothing flashy or extravagant but a quiet determination, backed up by dogged research. 

For the first time at a World Cup, England won a penalty shoot-out, the result of diligent practice and work with psychologists. Set-plays became a major weapon: again, something planned, but an unglamorous way of winning. The country was gripped by a strange euphoria. England had been dismal in every tournament since Euro 2004; this was the unleashing of a great pent-up patriotic wave.

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Tournaments are deceptive spaces, their place in the popular consciousness far more down to their vibe than any actual detail. In the aftermath of their elimination by Iceland at Euro 2016 under Roy Hodgson and then his successor’s rapid departure after being caught on camera apparently drinking a pint of wine (Allardyce was obviously drinking water, but reputation sometimes skews the perspective), England were a laughing stock and so to reach the semi-final was a remarkable achievement.

But England did lose as many games as they had won in that tournament and the draw had been very kind. There was also a sense that the semi-final against Croatia represented an opportunity missed. England had gone 1-0 up and then had apparently frozen with the line in sight. Southgate had responded slowly to Croatia taking control of midfield. Both issues would be raised again at Euro 2020.

That competition really was a golden chance squandered. Again the draw was relatively gentle — even offering up a fading Germany for a cathartic 2-0 win. The tournament was spread across Europe but, because of differing Covid regulations, England ended up playing six of their seven games at Wembley. In the final against Italy, they went 1-0 up. But again England froze as their fingers closed on the prize and again Southgate was slow to react. 

Even then, they might have won on penalties. Southgate was meticulous. He had done more work on penalties than any previous England manager. He had ended the hoodoo. If Marcus Rashford’s penalty had gone three inches to the right, England would probably have won. But it hit the post and bounced to safety, then Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho missed. England had fumbled the opportunity again. 

This time, there was far less sympathy. This time, as the three players who had missed were subjected to racist abuse on social media, there was a reckoning, less of Southgate than of fan behaviour at the final. A day of heavy drinking, cocaine openly consumed on the street and a fan sticking a flare up his arse culminated in a surge on Wembley and several hundred fans getting in without tickets, and fighting on the concourses. The glee of 2018 had curdled.

Southgate had begun to lose support on the political Right because of his support of players taking the knee. Then, at the World Cup in Qatar in 2022, he lost support from the Left because of his reluctance to be overly critical of the host nation.

But perhaps what is most striking is how calm he has remained discussing such subjects. He has never attacked the questioner, never sneered, never become flustered. He’s always been quite willing to discuss wider issues, when it would be very easy for him to insist that he’s just a football man. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to recognise a value in his tone, to wonder whether life mightn’t be better if more press conferences were conducted with similar consideration, thoughtfulness and graciousness.

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In terms of the football, England played well in Qatar. They were more expansive than they had been at the Euros, seemingly more confident in their creative abilities. They lost in the quarter-final but in a close game against France that could have gone either way. Maguire headed against the post at one end then Olivier Giroud’s effort at the other flicked his head and flashed in. Harry Kane missed a penalty. Another referee might have decided Saka was fouled in the build-up to France’s opener. 

Perhaps Kane’s miss from the spot eight minutes from time was a result of anxiety but this was a different quality of exit; there was no real sense of a chance wasted, just two good teams going at each other and the margins favouring France. To an extent, it was a measure of how far Southgate had brought the side that England went into a game against the reigning world champions as their near equals. And yet, the nagging thought remained that England always lose when they face good sides; it’s a thought that is not entirely explained by the fact that few teams look particularly good once you’ve beaten them.

And so Southgate goes again, into a fourth tournament. There is real expectation. Germany, Portugal, Spain and Italy, possibly the Netherlands and Belgium all look dangerous, but England and France have the best squads. Southgate’s selection has prompted talk of his ruthlessness in leaving out Marcus Rashford, Jordan Henderson, James Maddison and Jack Grelaish, as though this was a new decisiveness.

The truth is he has always been ruthless, as Joe Hart and Wayne Rooney discovered when they were left out of the squad for Russia in 2018. Southgate has always been his own man, ignoring the clamour for certain players and claims he is over-loyal, never afraid to dispose of a player if necessary; it’s just that his air of reasonableness means it often goes unnoticed. He said very early on in his reign that he wanted to stand or fall on his own terms and to that ideal he has remained true.

He has been an excellent England manager, the best since Alf Ramsey, who also battled constant accusations of overcaution. If he could only react quicker to in-game problems and get his players to lose their fear of success, he might actually win something.

There was something touchingly awkward about Southgate. He seemed shy and decent, his fabled waistcoat a totem of a nobler age as he probed at the boundaries of his role, recognising that this wasn’t just about getting a result against Tunisia or working out a way not to be terrible at penalties — that being England manager meant he could, perhaps should, play a social role. 

By 2021, he had fully embraced this, writing an open letter in which he set out the “duty” of England players to “interact with the public on matters such as equality, inclusivity and racial injustice”. Two years on, that letter has inspired James Graham’s play, Dear England, which launched at the National this week.

Football has a way of catching up with all managers. As Brian Clough’s great mentor Harry Storer observed, it is a game in which nobody ever says thank you. Successes are quickly forgotten; frustration the default mood. After leading England in three tournaments, there’s a background grumble of discontent around Southgate. He’s too defensive, too grey, too soft, pundits and fans complain; he needs to release the handbrake and let this unprecedented generation of attacking talent take wing. They must be unleashed. That he has overseen a level of achievement not enjoyed since the days of Alf Ramsey half a century ago, or that he has been in charge for 40% of all major knockout games ever won by England, is often ignored.

Southgate became England manager by mistake, which was greatly to his advantage. The England national team had been in a mess for a decade. Sven-Göran Eriksson had left after the Wag-fuelled hedonism and disappointment of the 2006 World Cup. Under Steve McClaren, England failed even to qualify for Euro 2008 — then the 2010 World Cup, under the Italian martinet Fabio Capello, was even worse than 2006. Roy Hodgson, with his accent from British gangster films of the Sixties, was a step back to traditional virtues. But nothing improved. The nadir came as they were eliminated from Euro 2016 by Iceland four days after the Brexit referendum. 

“Fuck off, Europe, we voted out,” chanted fans, as Europe and the quarter-finals went on quite happily without England. Hodgson was replaced by Sam Allardyce who lasted 67 days before the Football Association panicked and forced him to resign following a Telegraph sting that amounted to very little, but did, thanks to the lighting on the footage produced by their secret cameras, seem to depict him drinking a pint of wine. Continental sophisticate he was not; and he never made any secret of his pro-Brexit leanings. 

Enter Southgate, who was the Under-21 coach and whose main draw was the fact he was available. He seems neither to have sought nor particularly wanted the job; he was very much an accidental hero, a Richard Hannay figure plucked suddenly from the largely uneventful world of youth football into one of highest-profile roles in the country. He thrived. England have probably never gone into a World Cup with lower expectations than they did in Russia 2018. But Southgate created a likeable, engaging side. They had fun in a swimming pool with inflatable unicorns. They hammered Panama. They even won a penalty shoot-out. 

And through it all, Southgate seemed an admirably calm, unflappable presence. After the penalty shoot-out win over Colombia, he made a point of consoling both Colombia’s coach, José Pékerman, and Carlos Bacca, who had missed the decisive kick. There was an old-fashioned decency about him that stood in obvious contrast to the post-Brexit machinations in Westminster. To a certain constituency, there was something consoling in that: this was an appealing image of Englishness.

But it was not everyone’s image of Englishness. When, following a squad discussion (for Southgate’s leadership is, of course, consensual), England players took the knee before a pre-Euro 2020 friendly in Middlesbrough, they were booed. That was the context of Southgate’s open letter. During the pandemic, footballers (and their pay packets) also became an easy target for politicians seeking a scapegoat — Matt Hancock, unsurprisingly, foremost among them. 

Now, footballers’ wages may be obscene, but are they more obscene than, say, the pay of hedge-fund managers or the executives of utility companies? Why were they not urged to sacrifice more? Could it be because, for those critics and the audience they were appealing to, the social background of the person making the money is what really counts?

If anything, football generally demonstrated its social conscience during lockdown. It wasn’t just Marcus Rashford and his campaigns for free meals for schoolchildren during holidays; Jordan Henderson organised the Players Together campaign to arrange donations to the NHS, while countless others made donations to hospitals, food banks and local charities. A couple of decades ago, sports stars were essentially billboards: their off-pitch purpose was to wear their sponsors’ gear and keep quiet. Post-Colin Kaepernick, though, there has been an increasing willingness to speak out on political issues. Whether that is, as Southgate said, a “duty” or merely a right is debatable, but, particularly as football has become a theatre for Middle Eastern foreign policy, it seems absurd to expect players to “stick to football”.

What is notable now about Southgate’s letter, published a week after the booing at Middlesbrough (and two days after taking the knee at a subsequent game brought boos that were soon drowned out by applause), is how defensive it is. He emphasises his patriotism, filtered through the figure of his grandfather, who served in the Royal Marines in the Second World War. He talks about his love of the queen and pageantry, and describes England as “an incredible nation”. There is a very deliberate distancing of himself from the suspicion he might be a bit Remainery, a bit cosmopolitan, a bit liberal.

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More significant is his focus on the “pride” that he insists all England players feel, which is ostensibly a rebuttal of the charge that modern players in their gilded bubbles don’t care for the national team, but seems also, in the context of the booing of support for Black Lives Matter, to hint at his multicultural, multiracial team as the avatar of a more diverse England. And this is one of the ironies of football: it still has huge issues with race, both in terms of abuse from the terraces and of representation in the dugout, in the boardroom and in the press-box. On the pitch, though, football is as diverse an industry as there is in England: obviously nothing is absolutely perfect but, by and large, teams are meritocracies in which the only question asked is how good you are. 

After attacking those who “choose to insult somebody for something as ridiculous as the colour of their skin”, Southgate wrote that “it’s clear to me that we are heading for a much more tolerant and understanding society”, which seemed an extremely optimistic take on how post-Brexit England may appear. The racist abuse suffered online by Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka after they missed penalties in the shoot-out in the final perhaps came as a grim reminder of how far that ideal world is from the reality.

There was also a disappointing dose of reality in Qatar last year as England (and every other team) were timid in highlighting just how disgraceful it was that the World Cup was being held in a country so obviously in breach of Fifa statutes against discrimination on race, gender and sexuality, or that infrastructure had been built through scandalous labour practices. But perhaps that is understandable: a football team is primarily a football team; it’s not a vehicle to drive social change. Certainly, the players were not the villains in Doha.

But then football is itself a political act. Show me how you play, as the Uruguayan theorist Eduardo Galeano put it, and I will tell you who you are. Minor quibbles can be raised about Southgate as a manager, notably over his capacity to make in-game changes, but the most prevalent criticism is that he is too cautious. Again, this is not unique to him, and is a very common complaint at international level — partly because national sides, having less time to prepare, are always less slick than the best club teams; and partly because a lot of people with limited knowledge of football get involved at major tournaments and demand to be entertained and excited. 

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For some, though, that has become merged with doubts over Southgate’s (apparently) liberal principles. He is the establishment bureaucrat thwarting the will of the people; if only he would stand aside, with his pettifogging insistence on process, the glory of the English people could be unleashed. This, of course, is precisely the arrogance that has dogged English football since countries outside Britain started to get good at the game a century ago: the assumed superiority that means England approach most tournaments believing themselves to be among the favourites.

In 2018, England had sunk to the point that expectation was lowered, which perhaps made it easier for Southgate to enact his decent revolution. By 2021, the expectation was back, and in Southgate’s insistence his players should be “humble, proud and liberated in being their true selves”, there seemed a veiled warning against the arrogance of old — the arrogance of English exceptionalism that, for some, perhaps, explained Brexit.

That has meant there has been an extra edge in some of the criticism of him; there is a clear sense from certain fans that Southgate is not one of them. But, as Southgate acknowledges, there are multiple Englishnesses. His is open, thoughtful and tolerant — which in the modern world feels a refreshing change. This is the word of the anteater.

Warhammer is a game of dice. You make little armies of plastic figurines, paint them up, and then take it in turns to move and shoot, rolling the dice to see how well your little chaps do it. I used to play it as a child; then, 25 years later, blessed with more disposable income and burdened with less social shame, I took it up again. 

Since then, to my slight surprise, a little group of my friends has taken it up as well, dads in their late thirties and early forties, some of whom played in their youth, some of whom did not but who have obviously been closet nerds for decades. We play Kill Team, a smaller, faster version of the game, with only a dozen or so models on each side; the real Warhammer 40K could have 50 or more and might take four hours for a game, and we have jobs and families.

The idea is simple enough – your Necron Warrior’s Gauss blaster might shoot 24” and hit on a three, so you measure the distance, crouch down to see if it can see its target, and then roll. Then, if you hit, you roll the other dice to see if it does any damage. Or for your fang-toothed, green-skinned, cleaver-wielding Ork Boyz, you might roll to see if they successfully charge into combat, and then roll again to see how many times they hit their opponents.

The game is all about dice-rolling. It is explicitly random – dice are the archetypal random-number generator. The game is about understanding and managing randomness, about surfing uncertainty; the skill is in navigating the luck. Your big, tough Terminator has good armour; you can probably expect him to shrug off most shots from normal guns. But if you get shot enough times, you’ll probably roll a few ones. Do you dare put him out in the open where everyone can see him, but where he can quickly close with the enemy and do the most damage? Or do you try to sneak him around behind cover, which takes more time but is safer?

We struggle, sometimes, with randomness and uncertainty. We struggle with it in the sense that we don’t enjoy it – we don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen. We struggle with it in the sense that we are bad judges of how likely or unlikely things are, of thinking in more complex shades than “will happen, won’t happen, might happen”.

But we also struggle with it in the sense that we don’t recognise it: after the fact, contingent facts seem inevitable; randomness dissolves into fate. We judge decisions not by whether they were made using the best information available at the time, but by what actually happened – a mistake known as “outcome bias”. Say I charge my Terminator out into the open and he gets 15 lasgun shots in the face, with three of them sneaking past his armour, killing him: did I make the wrong decision? Maybe – but maybe I made the right decision and rolled a few bad dice. 

Years ago, I used to play poker, very occasionally and very badly: I tended to get drunk and go all-in on bad hands. Once, I played at a casino against a pro for a feature for the Telegraph. As usual, I played my signature move, betting very heavily on useless cards after a few pints; but for once, I drew exactly what I needed on the river, and won. Very obviously, I had made bad decisions, but got lucky. But from the inside, it felt as though I had played brilliantly. 

I spoke to a financial trader for that poker piece, who uses poker to teach decision-making; he said that in games of uncertainty, like poker (or like Warhammer, he did not in fact say but could have), you can only detect the role of skill over a long time. Even after a new player has played 100 hours of poker, he said, still, “we don’t feel that we have a good handle on truth;” there’s so much noise, so much luck, that the (very real) skill can be drowned out except over the very long term. “If you win a single hand,”, I wrote at the time, “it’s meaningless to attribute it to skill. If you’re in profit after 100,000 hands, you can say with reasonable confidence that you’re a skilled player.”

In Warhammer, too, it feels as though the outcome of the decision is what determines whether a decision was the right one. But these are games of chance – explicitly random. That is, I think, why games of chance are important. Because you know they’re random, it’s easier to detach the outcome from the process. In other areas of life, without the training that games of chance give you, it’s not so easy.

A stock trader might become a billionaire off a few lucky trades. Are they good? We don’t know: millions of traders make trades every day; some of them will be lucky. A company runs a huge profit for a couple of years: is that because it’s well-run? We don’t know; it could just be survivorship bias. Warren Buffet clearly is genuinely skilled: we have years of data to show that. But if someone has one good year, that might just be fluke.

We have an inbuilt need to explain success and failure. And sometimes that’s important. But in some situations, huge outcomes hinge on tiny moments; a dice-roll, in essence, but a hidden dice-roll. The recent Batley & Spen by-election, for instance: Labour won it by 323 votes. In an electorate of 80,000, that’s essentially coming down to a coin-toss. If Labour had lost by 323 votes, it would have been a huge blow to Keir Starmer’s leadership; he might have faced a challenge. But in reality it would have told us nothing different about his success or otherwise.

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Or football. As I write this, the memory of England going out on penalties is still fresh and painful; Gareth Southgate is being criticised for bringing Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho on in the last minute of extra time to take penalties, and for asking Bukayo Saka, a teenager, to take the last one. They all missed.

But before the shootout, Jermaine Jenas, the BBC co-commentator, was saying that Sancho was probably being brought on because he had the fearlessness of youth. The outcome was negative, but was the process wrong? As this guy says, in 1996 people got angry with Terry Venables for leaving penalty-takers like Robbie Fowler on the bench; in 2021 we get angry with Southgate for doing the opposite. And it works both ways: at 1-0 up against Germany, Thomas Müller ran clean through after a misplaced pass from Raheem Sterling; he should have scored but put his shot just wide of the post. He would probably make that shot five times out of six; he rolled a one. Sometimes you do.

People then make narratives about it. If the Tories had won Batley & Spen, we’d have been told it was because the Hancock affair wasn’t cutting through, or because “woke” issues were alienating the Labour base. Labour won, so the ground game was strong, or Kim Leadbetter was an engaging candidate. 

Likewise: if Müller scores, our defence isn’t good enough; if Rashford does (and his penalty sent the keeper the wrong way and was only a couple of inches wide), then Southgate’s plan worked. But if you’re trained by games of chance, then you can think: OK, sometimes you roll a one; sometimes the coinflip comes up heads. 

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There’s an obvious counter-argument: dice actually are random, whereas football and politics are not. But that’s wrong. Technically, dice are not random: when you throw them, you impart a certain amount of spin, you give them a particular velocity, they will bounce a certain way. The face they show when they land is not randomly determined: it is determined by how you threw them, by the surface they land on, by how sharp or rounded their corners are, by their density and elasticity. A Laplace’s demon, an all-knowing God, could in theory predict how they bounce, limited only by the apparently true randomness at the quantum heart of the universe. But in reality, as chaos theory tells us, tiny changes in the input make it fundamentally unpredictable.

Similarly, tiny, unnoticeable differences in reality can have major impacts on your outcome. David Foster Wallace, writing about tennis in 2006, talks about the minuscule details a tennis player has to pay attention to: the tiniest difference in the angle of the racquet’s face; hitting a ball a millisecond earlier or later. Tennis players repetitively, obsessively hit the same shots thousands and thousands of times in training, so that it is second nature, so they can hit it 999 times out of 1,000. But still, a minor irregularity in the court’s surface can change a bounce; a momentary slip can make a shot fail. The difference between a bad player and a good one is that the good one is more able to control randomness, to put the ball into the area they want to more often. But the randomness is still there. If, in Batley & Spen, a few Labour activists had had to self-isolate for Covid, or if the weather had been different, that might have changed the result. 

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If you want to draw conclusions from these things — to say that England should have done X or Labour should have done Y — there are hard limits on how much you can say, from a single data point like a by-election or a cup final. Too much of sports and politics journalism, I think, is finding narratives after the fact, “analysing” events by looking at the results. As in poker, you need more data than a single hand can provide. 

We suck at spotting randomness. The whole enterprise of science is a careful, and only partially successful, attempt to get past our innate human need to see patterns where they often are not. But one way of training your own ability to think about processes, not outcomes, to see the hidden dice rolls behind the events that shape our world, is to play something with real dice rolls. It doesn’t have to be Warhammer; Dungeons & Dragons will do, or poker, or bridge; cards do the job just as well as dice. But I do recommend Warhammer, because you can learn about randomness while also smashing someone to pieces with a gigantic poisonous scythe. Which makes it a lot more fun. I’m going to preorder the new edition.

Stiles was a product of the working-class Irish suburbs of Manchester, and became a fixture in the great United teams managed by Sir Matt Busby – another daily Massgoer and son of the Irish diaspora (who held a Papal Knighthood alongside the “K” he received from Queen Elizabeth). There were several more players of Irish extraction in England’s 1966 squad: Gerry Byrne, John Connelly and Ian Callaghan (not to mention Peter Bonetti, whose family were Swiss Italians) and the Irish immigrant backgrounds of many of the current England team are striking: Kalvin Phillips’ mum is Irish and Harry Kane’s dad is from Galway, Harry Maguire’s grandparents come from Northern Ireland, while Declan Rice’s come from Cork – and not only did Jack Grealish (like Rice) represent Ireland in his youth, but he was a talented childhood GAA player too.

If anything, Stiles’ religiosity was more unusual for a footballer then than it is now (although Jack Charlton seemed to offer up thanks at the final whistle, and his boss at Leeds, Don Revie, would surprise his roommates by kneeling in prayer at bedtime). For not only have football matches become increasingly liturgical – barely a week goes by without a minute’s silence, or a minute’s applause, black armbands, rainbow laces and compulsory poppies, and now the players actually genuflect before every game – but the faith of the players themselves is more obvious too.

Raheem Sterling, Bukayo Saka and Marcus Rashford are all practising Christians – recalling a time when muscular Christianity sprouted football teams across the country, including Everton, Southampton, Manchester City and Bolton Wanderers; and in Rashford’s case his effective campaign to provide free school meals had echoes of the Poor Children’s Dinner Table, a charity in Glasgow founded by an Irish Marist brother, which became Glasgow Celtic FC.

Both Rashford and Raheem Sterling have spoken movingly about the grinding childhood poverty that shaped them. Sterling’s experiences were almost Dickensian, for after his father was murdered in Jamaica, his mother brought the family to England to find a better life. This entailed working several jobs simultaneously to make extra money to pay for her degree, and the England midfielder has written that “I’ll never forget waking up at five in the morning before school and helping her clean the toilets at the hotel in Stonebridge. I’d be arguing with my sister, like, “No! No! You got the toilets this time. I got the bed sheets.”

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But the boys of 1966 were no stranger to hardship: Martin Peters had been evacuated from the East End of London during the Blitz; Ray Wilson had “Egypt never again” tattooed on his arm after an unhappy spell in the army in the 1950s; and Gordon Banks’ brother was mugged and killed when he was a child, and Banks himself built his upper strength through the hard graft of coal-heaving and hod-carrying before he turned professional.

It’s noticeable that the geographical spread of English footballing talent is now more evenly spread than it was 55 years ago (eight of the starting 11 in 1966 had been born in the North; compared to six northerners in the 2021 final side), but I’ve been pleased to see that the Great Northern Coalfield is still represented, as it always is in great England teams: in 1966 it was via the Charlton brothers from Northumberland, and in 2021 we have two Jordans from Sunderland, Pickford and Henderson (with the ‘Gateshead Guardiola’, Graeme Jones, pulling the strings on the training ground).

Although the class profile of football supporters has changed a lot since the 1960s, the team itself seems as resolutely working-class as it ever was – there was no space in the squad for the genuinely posh Patrick Bamford of Leeds United (of the JCB digger dynasty), a public school footballer in the mould of Frank Lampard – whose A* in Latin GCSE probably made him the most accomplished Latinist to play for England since C. B. Fry.

Class still marks out the parameters of English sport in a way that doesn’t pertain in the rest of Europe. (Indeed, appearing in the Italian dugout on Sunday night was Gianluca Vialli, a man who grew up in the Castello di Belgioioso, a 60-room palace outside Cremona.) And this brings us to the England managers of 1966 and 2021.  Both Alf Ramsey and Gareth Southgate are the products of new towns in the suburban South East, growing up in the modest suburbia of Dagenham and Crawley respectively. Alf Ramsay was famously up-tight about class signifiers: taking elocution lessons, and digging out a bowler hat for the visit of the Queen to Ipswich Town when he was manager there.

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Gareth Southgate seems more comfortable in his own skin, and has handled the task of managing England amid an all-consuming culture war with rare adroitness. It’s hard to imagine what Sir Alf would have thought about taking the knee, although Southgate was careful to cite his grandfather “a fierce patriot and a proud military man, who served during World War II” – just like Quartermaster Sergeant Ramsey himself in fact – as the wellspring of his values.

As well as their obvious patriotism, both men share a talent for meticulous man-management that have moulded great loyalty and fondness among their players, even if Southgate’s side were unable to win their final. For Ramsey was far from the aloof and detached figure of caricature, in fact, many of his players spoke of the respect and even love they felt for Sir Alf. This generation of England players and fans have found a figurehead who inspires similar esteem and affection – a man who may yet become Sir Gareth, and who all England fans hope will go the final step at next year’s World Cup in Qatar, and bring it home again.

The team turned away from glory. They retreated from a dazed Italian team. They could not tap into the wave of demonic national energy and were thus consumed by it. Sending out two players who had not kicked the ball in open play and a 19-year-old to take penalties was a cruelty that none of them deserved. Gareth Southgate builds his philosophy around bravery, kindness and ambition and none of those virtues was present in the last 75 minutes of the game. The final was not a new beginning but another chapter in a long story which might also be called a chronicle of a death foretold. That foreboding of heartbreak to come and an unrealised beauty.

My first memories of a confused sense of weirdness and impending heartbreak are tied up with football, and particularly England playing Germany. I can still see through my five-year-old eyes the fuzzy screen of our big fat black and white telly in the lounge with its dodgy aerial. The only clarity was an intense white dot when you turned it off. My brother insisted that I lay completely still on the floor while we played so that I wouldn’t disturb the picture. I remember the blurred insanity of the ball bouncing down off the crossbar and my overexcited confusion as the players ran in dreamtime. I lay on the floor crying, lying completely still. It was all too much. Apparently my Mum took me to bed with a fever. It’s coming home.

It was also my first experience of heresy. There was the shock of hearing German Jewish relatives say it wasn’t a goal, that the ball did not cross the line. That sent me into a spin from which I’ve never really recovered. What did they mean, Russian linesman? And then there was the lingering heartbreak of Jimmy Greaves. I was as sure as you could be sure of anything that he was the greatest striker in England and he was dropped from the team in favour of a West Ham player. He said that when the final whistle blew he felt like the loneliest man in the world and that he was never the same again. Well, that made two of us. It was the beginning of a lifelong argument with the FA management that defined the outcome of this tournament. A reluctance to trust the wild brilliance of English football. Brian Clough. The demons that have beset the soul of the England team were fully present in 1966.

I was a far more mature nine in 1970, and armed with a full Esso collection of world cup player coins in my album. It took me ages to get Paul Reaney, and he broke his leg and couldn’t even go to Mexico. I would stare for hours at the profile of Frances Lee and Colin Bell, Terry Cooper and Peter Bonetti. And all the feelings of heartbreak and weirdness that found first expression in 1966 returned. Bobby Moore getting arrested and jailed for four days for stealing a bracelet in a Bogota hotel. What was that all about? Fifty years later I still can’t get to the bottom of it. Bobby Moore remains an elusive character in a way that Bobby Charlton does not. And then there was the shock of the eternal figure of Gordon Banks going down with “Montezuma’s revenge”, whatever that was, just before the Germany game. And then the ecstasy of going two goals up. Back Home, we were really behind them when they were far away. And then it all fell apart. The numb awfulness of Germany equalising and then scoring the winner in extra time. I felt like I’d jumped off a mountain and was falling through space. Something inside of me died and I couldn’t really engage for two decades after that. That feeling that something was going wrong and no one was doing anything about it.

I began to believe that winning the World Cup with Geoff Hurst had put our football back 20 years. We couldn’t even qualify for the World Cup in the Seventies and our cameo appearances in the European Championship were fleeting. It seemed we were playing football in a parallel universe. The big number nine, the concrete feet. We were simultaneously brutal and naïve. It was something unique and completely dissatisfying. Don Revie disappearing in a puff of Saudi smoke. Tony Curry. And even when we finally qualified in 1982 we wouldn’t play Glen Hoddle. It seemed to me that English Football did not trust English footballers who were touched with the gift of passing. Nor the dribblers. Blame the management not the workers. In the Eighties it felt like there was a systematic loathing of working-class culture in our politics, economy and football. I clocked on for ‘86 and witnessed the two faces of Maradona but never felt that we were any more than a walk on part in his apotheosis.

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And then came Italia 90 and Paul Gascoigne. I was living in Italy and watched the semi-final in a bar full of Germans and all the old childhood feelings were back. That sickening sense of loss, the rage in the night. I stared at the figure of Peter Shilton and I could have sworn he was in my 1970 coin collection. How was he going to save German penalties. It looked to me that he was out of breath changing ends. In Paul Gascoigne however there was finally an expression of the wild brilliance of English football, of the intuitive stillness in the wind and rain.

I think it means so much to me because football is one of those rare parts of our society where the working class is its public face. Our politics is still public school, as is rugby, cricket and tennis. Our music has bursts of working-class mayhem but the spirit of Genesis and Pink Floyd is always lurking. It was not only football, we also gave progressive rock to the world and I am not sure what we can do to erase that shame. And yet football remains, for all the corporate commodification, a working-class sport and our football expresses that. The Wimbledon gasp is not something you hear at a football ground. The almost inaudible hum of the Wimbledon final on the Sunday afternoon before the game indicates where it stands in the national affections.

There is a demented kind of glory that is everywhere to be seen in English football and never expressed in the national team. Glen Hoddle turned against himself as a manager and David Batty represented his failure of courage. There was no real difference between Graham Taylor and his team. I remember Ossie Ardiles commenting that Carlton Palmer’s first touch was longer than he could kick the ball and the hype of the golden generation left me cold.

Neither Sven Goran Eriksson nor Fabio Capello had any feeling for English football and all the fizz was expressed in a unsatisfying burp. Roy Hodgson was more reminiscent of Montezuma’s revenge.

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Which brings us to now. To this team, to Gareth Southgate and the first ever England appearance in the final of a European Championship, the second final in our history. Back at Wembley.

We have beaten Germany, and with very little anxiety. Whatever the American origins of taking the knee it has been assimilated into English football as part of a long-standing campaign against racism that has nobility. I was at Wembley when Viv Anderson made his debut for England, the first ever black player, and I remember the boos as well as the applause. As a game played by working-class people there is an intense relationship between footballers of different backgrounds. Football is a rare case of something that brings races, and places together. A patchwork of England flags with the names of small towns on them, Kiddeminster, Grimsby and Yeovil were draped all around me when I watched the qualifying game against Scotland.

But the old anxieties still linger. Why didn’t we play Grealish from the start? Why do we still mistrust the players who play? There is great potential in this England team but it will not be realised until their soul is set free. It’s the same old story. This was not a perfect Italian team. They lacked two essential features, a sublime 10 — like Pirlo, Antognoni or a Baggio — and a merciless 9 — like Rossi, Inzaghi or Mancini. What they had was great passers in Jorginho and Veratti, a magnificent defence and wingers who were prepared to run. If the game was contained, then they would win. It would have taken a wild kind of courage to defeat them and we had it, then we lost it.

Don’t blame the players, blame the management.

Southgate is the sort of footballer who, in team photos from the early Seventies, would have been the last one to sport a short, back and sides when everyone else was looking like Charlie George. A haircut to set your watch to, as Grampa Simpson put it.

That someone like Southgate would support England players taking the knee, the gesture associated with Black Lives Matter, is telling, then, about how far social attitudes have changed in the last few decades. Although Southgate felt the need to write an elegant defence, it’s perhaps more surprising how little opposition taking the knee faced, and how even most critics proclaimed to support BLM’s aims, if not methods. Indeed, it’s arguable that there has never been so little doubt in public life about what is morally wrong and right, at least in our lifetimes.

The past 50 years or so have seen a cultural revolution in western society comparable in scope to the Reformation. Most of us have known only that period of transition, when morality and norms were up for debate, but perhaps it is now over. Perhaps we have returned to the sort of world we lived in when England last reached a final, in 1966 – a world of strictly enforced social mores.

The year 2020 marked a convenient end to the cultural revolution, because of the vastly different nature of the protests that took place that summer, compared with 1968. In the late Sixties, student radicals were protesting against the system. American academia itself was politically mixed; there were around three Democrat professors for every Republican — it’s now about 15 to 1 — but the higher echelons of the Ivy League were quite conservative. The Boston Brahmin elite were still pretty traditional, as was big business (although, not coincidentally, far more egalitarian than it is now). The Army was obviously very Right-wing, and one of the causes of student protests was the prospect of being drafted into a war to defend the honour of a conservative American establishment.

In 2020, almost all the major institutions in the US, aside from the actual President, were loudly vocal along with corporations, charities and NGOs in their support for the BLM protests. Parts of the media were sympathetic to the point of actively playing down some of the violence, the phrase “mostly peaceful protests” becoming an example of American journalism’s Pravda-like bias.

The protesters themselves tended to come from America’s upper-middle-class, displaying a feverous zeal that felt alarming. And there was no debate to be had about race and policing, opponents simply had to educate themselves.

During those decades of social change, the problem of Left-wing “moral relativism” was often a complaint of conservative commentators, but look today at the young protesters demanding that  “Rhodes must fall” or “black trans lives matters”. They certainly aren’t moral relativists.

Relativism is a position you employ when you’re weak, to be abandoned when you win. On a wide range of issues, including race and gender, the Right has been more relativist for some time. Before the 1968 revolution those outside of power (the Left) argued for moral relativism, those in power (the Right) argued for moral absolutism. Now it is the opposite. Even things like claims to absolute truths (“trust the science”) have changed. Likewise with censorship, which is by definition a tool of the powerful.

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Before the Sixties, book publishing was restricted on grounds of obscenity; I still have as a family heirloom, an early copy of Ulysses published in Paris because it was too obscene to be printed in London. It’s in fine condition, being unreadable.

But book censorship began to break down with the 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial; there were still a few obscenity cases afterwards, but this was seen as the end. Most famous of all in the public imagination were the prosecutor’s comments about this not being the sort of thing you’d want your servants to see, a comment so laughably out-of-touch that it made a mockery of the old ruling class – and no ruling class or moral order can survive being openly mocked in that way.

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Yet liberals demanding a permissive society in the Sixties were pushing at an open door, with an establishment that was often sympathetic. At the time of the case the Bishop of Woolwich had argued, in pure Thought for the Day-ese, that “what Lawrence is trying to do is to portray the sex relationship as something essentially sacred… in a real sense an act of holy communion”. It’s hard to see a leading voice of morality today defending a play or novel that was seen as obscenely close to racism or homophobia.

But the British and American establishments of the late 20^th century were historically quite unusual in allowing themselves to be mocked; from the mid-Sixties onwards, television regularly made fun of the habits and beliefs of the powers-that-be, with Monty Python — the most prominent product of the satire boom — pointing fun at the people who ran the country. Their 1979 film Life of Brian even mocked the beliefs of that old establishment. Two of the Pythons debated an Anglican bishop and Catholic writer Malcolm Muggeridge, but no one serious tried to stop the film.

Life of Brian couldn’t be made 20 years earlier, and neither could it be made now; its satire of Jesus, a prophet of Islam, would risk upsetting Muslim sensibilities, which it’s fair to say people have become slightly wary of doing. At the very least it would need to cut out the scene pointing fun at a man who, absurdly to the filmmakers and audiences, identifies as a woman; absurd in 1979, as it had been in 1879 and 1779 and in every year before that, but a sacred idea in 2021.

It’s sacred in the sense that its believers have captured the moral citadel where the most powerful ideas are protected by taboo, achieved either by emotional argument or intimidation (and both can be effective).

This is not some dark new age of cancel culture, however, it’s just a return to normality. Those who grew up in the late 20^th century were living in a highly unusual time, one that could never be sustained, a sexual and cultural revolution that began in 1963 or 1968. But it has ended and, as all revolutionaries must do after storming the Bastille, they have built Bastilles of their own. The new order has brought in numerous methods used by the old order to exert control — not just censorship, but word taboo and rituals which everyone is forced to go along with, or at least not openly criticise. You might call it the new intolerance, or woke extremism, but all societies need the policing of social norms.

No one would satirise the transgender movement today; no one would dare point fun at BLM, or Pride month; no one would dare joke about George Floyd, because like the publishers of Gay Times in 1977, they might face jail for blasphemy.  Instead leading satirist Sacha Baron Cohen makes a living making jokes at the expense of the little people. Indeed the only satire made now pokes fun at the old establishment, like punching the corpse of a once-ferocious zoo animal, or the people who still hold the old beliefs; the elderly, the less educated, the rural and provincial. The powerless.

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The Nineties and Noughties were a time of outstanding comedy partly because so much of public morality was up for grabs, and in transition; it was a period in between two quite rigid societies.

A sign of how the environment has changed can be seen in the changing tone of the word“controversial”. The term once had a neutral, or even positive, undertone, to denote cutting-edge artwork that challenged us. Now it is used entirely by the media to denote a policy or position they disapprove of, and which you are therefore supposed to disapprove of. It means something beyond the pale of acceptable opinion, a pale that has shrunk as the cultural revolution has ended, illustrated by neologisms like “problematic”.

The MeToo movement was to some extent an end-of-cultural-revolution moment. Janice Turner made the point that the Seventies and Eighties were the worst periods for abuse because sexual freedom had been achieved but not yet sexual equality. It was an ambiguous, revolutionary period, always fun times for abusive men, but that can’t last; someone has to police sexual behaviour in a species in which males have 40% more upper body strength than females. The stricter sexual atmosphere since then reflects that revolutionary period ending.

Revolutionaries who establish themselves in power inevitably start thinking about firming up that power. They have a vested interest in making the times before seems worse than they really were, which is why contemporary films or plays set before the Sixties must always show it as racially prejudiced or portray traditional marriages as unhappy. Revolutionaries also need to start thinking about public rituals that imitate faith, something the Soviets, Chinese Communists and Jacobins all imitated in various ways. Rituals in particular attract children and adolescents; just as young people across Europe once dressed up to celebrate Corpus Christi, run riot on Shrove Tuesday or flirt on St John’s Eve, now Pride month and the other new feasts of the calendar are increasingly popular with children, spread through TikTok and other social media.

The religious nature of the 2020 protest has been much commented on, with strange outpourings of hysteria and feet-washing, and with Floyd becoming an icon.

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Perhaps the most powerful, and obviously quasi-religious, symbol of the new order is taking the knee. Indeed, intelligent people have even argued that taking the knee before games or displaying the rainbow flag at stadiums are not “political” acts, when critics have pedantically pointed out that they clearly are; because when you doubt your politics so little it barely registers as politics anymore. And to believers, something like racism or homophobia is non-negotiable; there is no moral relativism allowed.

Before the cultural revolution, public morals were patrolled by volunteers, believers in the dominant religion (Christianity) and typically women, Mary Whitehouse being the archetype of the disapproving great-aunt. Now the revolution has ended, public morality is patrolled by volunteers, believers in the public religion (and typically women, although gender differences are one of the taboos of the new age).

The way in which the Left had taken the role of the Right was best summed up by Scott Alexander, who asked what happened to the stodgy old conservatives who used to enforce public morality in the Fifties. Where would they be now? Of the archetypal disapproving great aunt figure, he said, it’s hard to argue she is “not a proud leftist by now, still chattering about how scandalous it is that people read books with the wrong values, still giving her terminally uncool speeches to the school board about how they had better enforce her values on the children”.

The revolutionaries were always going to create new rituals, new speech codes and new forms of censorship. England has changed a huge deal since our great victory in 1966, but in many ways it has barely changed at all.