Gareth Southgate on a ‘remarkable’ 2021 and England’s missing piece | Football News

England manager Gareth Southgate sits down with Sky Sports to reflect on an eventful past 12 months that saw his side come within a whisker of a first-ever Euros triumph, as well as looking ahead to 2022 when he will look to guide England to World Cup glory in Qatar.

Southgate and England have enjoyed a remarkable year, with the 51-year-old managing to take the country to the final of the delayed Euro 2020 at Wembley in July, their first appearance in the final of a major tournament since 1966.

However, while England did eventually lose to Italy 3-2 on penalties, Southgate has subsequently managed to qualify the team for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, with the manager’s reward being a new contract until 2024.

Here, Southgate looks back on the last year – one which saw England trail for just nine minutes at the Euros and only 22 minutes in total across 19 games – and just how close he and his players came to glory on home soil, before turning his attentions to what could be an even better 2022…

2021 has been quite an extraordinary year – how do you reflect on it?

Yeah, I think it has been a remarkable year really. There’s always going to be in our head being in a final and not getting over the line. But if I look logically as a coach at the progress of our team, the last two qualification campaigns, we have been top scorers in Europe. I think we’ve got the best defensive record in the world over the last 12 months or so as well. And we were behind in those 19 matches across the calendar year for 22 minutes, so it’s an incredible performance by the players.

They dealt with the pressure of being at home in a big tournament. They’ve managed to qualify for the World Cup, which as we’ve seen from a couple of other high-profile nations, is not a given and a lot of young players have come through much stronger, much more experienced.

So, we were just, you know that missing piece of winning the final, our first final for 55 years, our first-ever European final, so there is so much for the team to be proud of and me to be proud of the team about.

How was that summer for you? We saw you immediately after and it looked like it took a toll on you. But I thought it was really interesting when you signed your new contract, you said you didn’t walk away now feeling you were that close to something potentially very special for this country.

Yes, I think as a manager, you want to be in a team where you have a chance of winning. There aren’t many opportunities in your life to do that. If you are in club football, there are more trophies to be won, but there are only a handful of teams that can realistically win. We are one of a group of teams that could win a major tournament internationally. We do not have as many opportunities to do that, and the level of the opponents is high, but we are in that mix and I think we’ve got a team at a point where they’ve got belief from results over a period of time, but also that hunger from not having quite got to where they want to be yet. And that is part of the excitement for us at working with them.

I wonder, how did you feel immediately after that final defeat, how you feel about it now, and how you think you will feel about it when you retire from management?

That depends on what happens over the next 15 years or so the last bit! Look, I look back far more positively now because you understand as a coach that you can’t just judge your team on winning. You’ve got to judge them on far more things, otherwise you’re not developing or helping them to improve.

Ultimately, I know that we will always be judged on results and that will always be part of the equation, but you can’t work that way with the team, otherwise you don’t give them the chance to grow. So, from that perspective, the progress across four to five years, the trajectory is good, the results have been consistent, and we’ve put a body of work together with them over a period of time where they keep improving.

But we’ve got to keep that going now, it’s hard to improve the results as there was only one match where we could do that (the Euro final). Nevertheless, performances you can still improve the team and you can still improve the way we’ve got to play and we’re going to have over the next few years the evolution of players, as well as some of the young, exciting players that have already played for us, become more established.

And you know, at the moment, all of our players can probably go through another tournament and maybe two more. But maybe some wouldn’t go beyond that and who knows what they want to do with their lives moving forward.

You’ve handed out 50 debuts so far in your tenure in five years – as we’re coming into a World Cup year, do you think you will be handing out any more?

I think you can have an idea of where you’d like to head with your group, and we’ve had a pretty consistent group of players now from just before the European Championships through the last season. But you just don’t know how quickly some of the young players are going to evolve, so although you would say, well, it’s unlikely that many are going to appear from nowhere and propel themselves into a World Cup in 12 months, 12 months is still considerable amount of time. We’ve seen what Conor Gallagher has done over the last 12 months. What Jude Bellingham did in the previous 12 months. So, you just can’t rule out any of those young players and why would we? You know, we’ve got some exceptionally good ones coming through

But it’s down to the players how well they play, how they react over that period of time. We will always have an open mind. Of course, I think you need a core group. You know that core group are really the guys that got us to a World Cup semi-final. They’re hardened to winning, they’ve had the disappointments of not quite getting there, they’ve got attributes about them that have led the rest of the group over the last three or four years and we’d be foolish to lose that. But you’ve always got to have an open mind to progress in the team.

Harry Kane’s goal tally in 2021 for England speaks for itself, it seems he feeds off these targets?

Absolutely, you know I think for any player, there’s always team objectives and then there’s individual targets that you want to hit and of course, for goal scorers, those targets are very obvious and very clear.

Harry will always want to make the most of his ability. He sets himself those targets, he’s got a clear aim individually with England, but also the team goal that he wants to achieve and yes, the better the team plays, he knows the more chances are created, more games you get to play, so he wants to achieve all of those things in this.

No doubt that’s a huge drive for him and you know when you look at what he’s done, in the number of games that he’s done it, I think only Jimmy Greaves comes anywhere near close to the goals per game. This is a phenomenal Iist of players were talking about.

Do you expect 2022 to be the year where Harry Kane becomes England’s all-time leading goal scorer?

Hard to be definitive because you don’t know who’s going to be available, who the games are going to be against, but he’s within touching distance now isn’t he? Again, when you list: Greaves, [Gary] Lineker, [Alan] Shearer, [Bobby] Charlton and [Wayne] Rooney, these are legends of English football. So, it tells us a little bit about where Harry’s status is going to be at the end of his career

Given the Nations League draw and a lack of fixtures before the World Cup, what is the current thinking about friendly opponents in March – potentially Northern Ireland being one of the teams?

Well, we haven’t had discussions with Northern Ireland. I think we had had some discussions with Germany, so I’m not sure for either of us whether that is worth, you know, a third game, but it is quite difficult now to get a certain level of opposition.

It’s clear we can’t play South American teams because they’ve still got their qualifying games. Most of the African teams are in qualifying games, although not all, so it’s just trying to work out, you know, what fixtures are available, who’s prepared to perhaps come to Wembley in March.

And yes, a little bit complicated and I’m not going to lie, Italy or Germany could have been possible, so I think that’s less likely now. But we just have to see what we can do over the next few weeks.

You’ve been asked previously about the issues of human rights in Qatar. You’ve said you would like a bit of time to discuss this with the squad once you had qualified. When do you plan to do this?

Yes, I think obviously players will be reading themselves. We’ve got to prepare our players as responsibly as we can to be able to help them form their opinions and also, you know when they’re speaking publicly be as informed as they possibly can be.

You know I’m following the news all the time, so I’m aware. We’ve spoken with people from Qatar already, we’ve spoken as an organisation to people from some of the groups like Amnesty International. So, you piece together varied stories and we’ve got to try to piece all of that together. I’m very conscious that part of my job is to protect the players. We don’t just want to be used as an opportunist way of other people landing the points they want to land.

We stand for an inclusive game. We stand as an inclusive team. I think everybody knows what our team is standing for, so we do care about that inclusivity in particular for everybody and our fans travelling to the World Cup as well, that’s very important to us. And there are other issues that clearly sound disturbing, but we need to be clearer on their facts before we comment on them publicly.

So, yes, we’re not afraid to speak up if we feel it’s right and I don’t want to turn March into a thing where the players are jumped upon and we’re spending our whole time (talking about Qatar) .

You know, we’ve got to prepare a team to play matches. We feel we have a responsibility to prepare them for questions from yourselves as well, but I don’t want them to be in the middle of something where they are being used to get other people’s points across and I am mindful of looking after them the best way possible.

Finally, you and this young squad have built some real confidence and belief in the country. You talked about the reuniting of this England team with the wider English public. With that in mind, and after coming as close as you have gone in a World Cup and Euros, do you have real belief going into the new year that 2022 could be a special year for England, that you can win the World Cup?

We went to Russia in 2018 I think not having won a knockout game for 10 years. That was our first objective. We went into Euro 2020 having got to the final stages of the World Cup with more belief because we’d beaten Croatia in the last Nations League, we’d beaten Spain away, so we had started to notch up some results against big teams.

Now we are in a position where we have been to a final, we have turned over a number of historic records and created moments of our own history, so yes, the missing piece for us is a trophy and that is incredibly difficult, but we’ve got that belief that we can do that.

There are two teams who have a playoff (Italy and Portugal) who could win that trophy, frankly. So, the level is really high, and it is quite even amongst the top teams because although we feel we have good players, we know other teams have good players as well. There was a FIFA 23-man squad announced just recently, there were players from everywhere around the world in that, not just England. So, we know the level is high, but we believe we are in that group of teams.