Who could replace Southgate? Dyche? Lampard?

Whatever the result, there’s a prescribed narrative for the pro and the anti-Gareth Southgate mentality. If we win, it will be a vindication for his selections, tactics and man-management. He will have given a huge boost to the country, and will have judged the tournament perfectly. It will be a win for an inclusive, holistic approach in managing 26 expensive and very rich footballers.

If we lose, he will have made the wrong choices in team and tactics. He will have been too conservative throughout and refused to take off the shackles. He will have lost to the first half-decent team they played and is massively overrated as a coach. Worse than all of this, Southgate is a tool of deep woke, so he must be sacked immediately.

Those are your choices.

But win or lose, Southgate will take the team to, God help us, Qatar. He will not be sacked and will not resign. So all those deep woke spotters will have to put up with the tyranny of his open, progressive liberal values for two more years at least.

Gareth Southgate is evaporating England cynicism every day

Because, after all, who else is there to be England manager? It has to be an Englishman and it shouldn’t even be legal to employ a non-native to manage the nation’s team; it is our lot versus your lot and that should include the manager, at least until you get down to the boondocks of the developing nations.

Who else but Gareth now? Eddie Howe? His stock has fallen massively. The U21s don’t even have a coach right now, after Southgate’s replacement in the role, Aidy Boothroyd, left in April.

Obviously there is no job that Frank Lampard cannot and would not be prepared to be crowned for without any qualification at all, but it would be an appointment that would be laughed at in some quarters and would seriously lack credibility.

Steven Gerrard is another who would be touted but there’s no way he’d leave his first managerial job for the national side at his age. Why self-harm?

Sean Dyche would no doubt like a go at it and is likely the candidate with the best chance of being appointed, given the positive press he’d inevitably attract from the less cerebral corners of football and the overall paucity of choices. Given that every appointment tends to be the opposite of the last man in the job, Dyche appears to be the counterbalance to Southgate’s deep wokeness (this is how some people think, honestly), would shout more and generally look like a drawing of a manager on the box of a 1980s football game. So that’s good then. He may be alright, he may be overawed in a David Moyes at Manchester United way. Hard to say.

He’s untested working under such huge scrutiny. The Burnley job is but a sputtering match to England’s army of flaming torches. At least Southgate had managed the England U21s and had a notion of what it would be like.

But if not Dyche, who? Steve Bruce? Scott Parker? Neil Warnock? Now that’d be fun. But surely not. Graham Potter is the only other realistic choice working today in the top flight. It would be a progressive and interesting pick but fails the ‘must not be like the last manager’ test and the deep woke crowd would be worried that anyone who encourages his players and staff to engage in community activities – performing in theatre and music productions – sounds suspiciously like another liberal lefty, and this merest hint of wokeness must be resisted at all costs or we will all be forced into being virtue signalling, transsexual Marxist non-gendered lesbians.

Unless the FA decided to get very radical and take on a lower-league manager (which would not be the worst idea) or employ Emma Hayes (which would be the best idea), of course. Neither are likely.

The press don’t even have a favoured candidate to pump, now that Big Sam took a dump in the wine glass of history, and as a result, are all largely on board the Gareth train to the future anyway. That’ll likely be the case until a compelling candidate comes to the fore and that won’t happen soon.

So we’d better get used to Gareth, because he could be in the job for a long time yet. Hurrah for that.