Gareth Southgate was roughly five minutes into his press conference to preview England’s match against Belgium when the news filtered through that Germany – football royalty, as far as the World Cup is concerned – had been dethroned and he was asked for his thoughts about a result that could probably encapsulate what is known as schadenfreude in the country that invented the term.
The England manager’s first reaction was to express his considerable surprise and if, deep down, there was a measure of excitement about the World Cup losing one of the teams that historically leave England with an inferiority complex, he suppressed it well. He was in Russia last summer, he pointed out, to see Joachim Löw’s team win the Confederations Cup and, two days before that victory, he had flown to Poland to watch Germany beat Spain in the final of the European Under-21 Championship.
Southgate is such an admirer of Germany’s national team, indeed he has trawled through hours of tapes to study their secrets, right down to the small details such as how many free‑kicks the five-times world champions concede in their own half (answer: very few). “We’ve learned an enormous amount from studying Germany, not least last summer, and implemented that,” the England manager said. “Indirectly, they’ve had a big bearing on what we’re doing now.”
Ultimately, though, the prospect of meeting Germany in the quarter‑finals is no more. “In sport and in life you have to keep evolving,” was Southgate’s take. “They’ve been ahead for about a minute and a half, in total, of their three matches and it’s unusual to see them struggle as much as they have. But they have played teams who have been tactically very good. They were close to the wire against Sweden and they have not been able to break Korea down. It just shows that any team can be vulnerable.”
More than that, Germany’s final position as the wooden-spoon team in Group F – their worst performance at a major tournament since Franz Beckenbauer accused them of “tired, junk football” at Euro 2000 – validates Southgate’s views about the practicalities of trying to plot a route through the tournament and why, specifically, his policy all the way along has been that “you can’t take anything for granted”.