‘Scandal’? ‘Clown show’? This is what happens when England lose ONE game

‘Scandal-hit England is back to clown show it was for decades before Gareth Southgate’ it says here. What the hell have we missed?

Well done Lee, you’re a good boy
The Sun have the back-page exclusive that Lee Carsley has been told he will NOT get the England job, which would explain all the mixed messaging that had the media in a pickle on Monday.

But Mediawatch is amused by the claim that Carsley ‘is understood to have accepted the FA’s decision without complaint’, which is somewhat damning with faint praise. What was the caretaker manager who lost at home to Greece going to do? Stamp his feet? Shout at the clouds? Scream and scream until he was sick?

Carsley has been criticised for failing to offer clarity but has earned the admiration of his FA bosses for attempting to give nothing away and keeping their recruitment plans secret.

Yes, well done fella. You indulged in some ‘bizarre psychodrama’ (you didn’t), to hide the fact that the FA were actually not utterly incompetent and had approached some very good football managers rather than sitting back with fingers crossed that the England Under-21 coach they already employed just happened to be world class.

But The Sun dedicate much of their back page to a bizarre plea to Pep Guardiola to ‘stop messing with us Pep!’ because he *checks notes* has not committed to the highly unlikely scenario of the England job while there are still seven months of a Premier League title race to fight.

Seems like perfectly normal behaviour. From him at least, if not the increasingly unhinged media.

Send in the clowns
Elsewhere in The Sun, somebody did not get the memo that Lee Carsley was actually doing his damnedest to protect the FA because, well, Chief Sports Writer Dave Kidd has been allowed at his laptop and…

Scandal-hit England is back to clown show it was for decades before Gareth Southgate – he’s still best man for the job

Scandal-hit? What f***ing scandal? Clown show? England lost one football match and the caretaker boss employed by the FA was clearly reluctant to commit either way to being anything other than a caretaker boss.

And that’s a ‘clown show’? Don’t let Dave Kidd ever offer to entertain at your children’s party. Unless of course your children are oddly amused by an old man shouting at clouds.

IT IS easy to forget, after eight serene years of Gareth Southgate, that the default mode for the England football team, and the FA, is one of utter chaos.

After last week’s bewildering, headless-chicken home defeat by Greece and the endless, dizzying ramblings from Lee Carsley about whether or not he wants to be Southgate’s full-time successor, it seems like deja vu all over again.

‘Endless, dizzying ramblings’? ‘Utter chaos’? Mediawatch is starting to think that we have missed something that wasn’t just a single defeat in one game of football and some slightly confusing messaging from a nervous caretaker manager out of his depth.

Before Southgate took over – and the Three Lions became supremely competent and professional on and off the field – it really always was stark, raving bonkers.

Under Southgate it could be a little boring, a little too cautious, at times.

But England rarely lost football matches, always featured at the sharp end of tournaments and were always a serious, rational set-up.

Hmmm. There’s no doubt that England were sensible under Southgate but they did lose some matches, Dave. There’s a reason why England are in the second strand in this Nations League campaign; in 2022 they failed to win a single Nations League game in a ‘campaign’ that included a 4-0 defeat to Hungary.

And ‘rarely lost’ hardly tells the full picture when England only won four of Southgate’s last 12 games in charge of England. And they really were sh*t in most of those 12 matches.

It’s okay to admire what Southgate achieved without pretending that a) he was faultless or b) it has become a ‘clown show’ since he left.

Except it’s not okay, is it? You have to pretend it’s all gone to hell in a handcart because that’s the only gear available.

Some of us knew England would miss Southgate dearly but perhaps we didn’t realise quite how soon, and quite how deeply, we would regret his exit.

‘Quite how deeply’? It’s one Nations League game under a caretaker manager who will not be in place when sh*t gets real.

Kidd takes us on a whistle-stop tour of England managers past and various farces before declaring that ‘now the impossible job feels impossible again’. No it doesn’t. You’re being weird.

Southgate has made this feel like anything but an impossible job because a very nice man with limited tactical nous created a team out of a collection of individuals and almost won some trophies. Imagine what a tactician could achieve.

But no, that won’t do…

Expectations, which had dipped after all those years of nut-casery, are now limitless because Southgate came so close, so often.

All of this is surely too big for Carsley. It feels too big for Potter, too.

And for Tuchel, or most unsuspecting overseas candidates, all of this lunatic history feels too big to comprehend.

This ‘lunatic history’ is exactly that: history. Kevin Keegan resigned in a toilet 24 years ago. What bearing should that have on whether Thomas Tuchel can be a successful England manager?

The only thing that makes this even close to an impossible job is the fact that ONE defeat leads to old hacks at once-popular newspapers writing about ‘clown shows’ as if they’re not the ones wearing red noses and massive shoes.

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