Harrington: Prepare the statue for Sir Gareth now
Nobody will remember that England were a little boring – or that we were only ever half-convinced that the manager really knew what he was doing
Friday, 12th July 2024
‘Sir’ Gareth Southgate, a boring manager but a nice man – perhaps the perfect accidental hero
ONE day, when we are grey or gone, children will walk past the statue and dream.
Teens will look up at the carefully roughed bronze, each whisker of our leading man’s beard perfectly accounted for, and ask to be retold the legend of the rainy summer with a happy ending.
“Tell it to me again, papa, about the man, just one more time.”
“Ok, kiddo. 2024? I couldn’t have been much older than you back then but I remember it being rainy and sunny then rainy and sunny for days. There was a new prime minister.
And this guy? This guy was Gareth, a gentle man, really, just like you and me…”
And right there the tale of our Euros adventure in Germany will be recounted perhaps next to a waistcoat preserved forever in unbreakable metal. Yes, we shouldn’t forget the waistcoat days.
Gareth Southgate’s a story that will sound better as it is passed down to each new generation.
Nobody will remember that England were, whisper it, a little boring or that we were only ever half-convinced that the manager really knew what he was doing.
The inscription will not say: “Squeaked past Slovakia, toiled to beat Switzerland and ‘then it was only the Netherlands’”.
No, the plate on the Southgate statue, if England bring home the trophy on Sunday, shall simply say: Sir Gareth Southgate. England manager. Euros winner 2024.
Good. For if he – “we” – take the golden chance before us this weekend, the children of the 2060s, 2070s and beyond will have to suck up the legend of Southgate, the accidental hero, like we’ve always had to listen to Kenneth Wolstenholme’s 1966 commentary over and over again.
Just think, in the bars of Germany right now there are commentators fantasising that it will be they who deliver the perfect line to an England winning goal in the final at the weekend.
England glory and a Southgate statue – note to Sir Antony Gormley: a beautifully sculpted double fist pump and bared teeth is Harrington’s preferred choice of design – would spread the hopeful world message that anything is possible.
A man on the moon, a black president, a female Dr Who, a slightly dorky centre-back becoming a Euros-winning manager.
Imagine.
It would be a totem, not for football genius, as Southgate’s caution does not fill such a label, but one for the basic, enduring quality of “being nice”, a spear to mean, shouty management and a monument to the honest endeavour of trying and trying again.
Like the mathematical theory which says monkeys would eventually bash out the complete works of Shakespeare with enough typewriters and infinite time, it would also restore faith in a law of probabilities which must surely state that if you play enough tournaments – enough penalty shootouts – at some stage you win.
Eventually.
We used to think England needed forever to type their own Midsummer Night’s Dream out too, but it might now just be a few days away now.
Prepare Sir Gareth’s statue.
