A Study in Subtly Confrontational Self-Justification

This soccer publication is curiously tedious, yet oddly captivating. Even title causes confusion. The Dear England title already is used by a popular theatrical production, an upcoming TV show, and a public letter written by the manager in 2021.

This iteration of Dear England isn’t officially connected to any of those. It exists as an oddity in the Dear England Multiverse, a book about guidance: a traditionally dull elite football manager theme that Southgate sticks to relentlessly, employing the words “leadership”, “guiding” or “leadership” no fewer than 500 times across 336 pages.

Inquiries Raised

“Who are the leaders? What do leaders do? And what do leaders know?” Southgate inquires in the opening, setting out his argument, but choosing not to ask “When are leaders?”, questions likely saved for a future volume.

Beyond that, this book has a significant gap at its core. It’s an attempt in subtly confrontational personal vindication, in coming close without actually stating the actual thing, jumping skillfully from lingering grievance to raw emotion across a collection of graphs, corporate platitudes and digressions about historical figures.

Engagement

Reading it is like overhearing your parents having a mannered but profoundly personal argument in the nearby area while you’re attempting to focus on a professional workshop called “112 Reasons Why Naturally I Had the Last Laugh”. But it is also challenging to put down, as the author keeps approaching to an issue you actually desire to hear about, before suddenly shifting focus.

Disclosures

The book contains typically news headlines in works like these, explained by the intense obsession with leading the national team. The most notable instances are: he resolved he was certainly going to quit as England manager after spectators hurled beer glasses at him at the Euros; he nearly decided to forfeiting the game at mid-match against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his players were targeted with slurs; he introduced the approach of specialist dead-ball trainers and everyone in the top division is now copying him; he has now abandoned his enthusiasm for football, a shocking admission casually mentioned in a brief section at the final part.

Guiding England through a era of rage, hope, upheaval and pandemic restrictions was a brutal journey. The bruises are evidently still unhealed.

Commonplace Material

Otherwise, the narrative is saturated with an AI-style verbal clutter of generic guidance discourse. Advanced copies of this publication were provided with reviewers under confidentiality clauses ahead of release, likely out of fear someone might reveal that “tough talks can, by their nature, be difficult”, that you should always think before you act, that management occurs where change meets empathy.

Emotional Core

There is nevertheless real sentiment within. Guiding England through a time of anger, aspiration, turmoil and lockdown was a harsh experience. The wounds are obviously still fresh, even if conveyed in a buzzword-filled reimagining of the classic football manager narrative: how my decisions were correct about everything from the start.

Detailed Instances

Even book’s initial chapter, disguised as gripping memories of the championship match of the tournament, is all about how effective the manager actually was at tactical substitutions (the big criticism of Southgate being he was not effective at altering the lineup). Subsequently, he goes into significant detail about how he oversaw the deciding game of 2021 perfectly – notably the unsuccessful tiebreaker – because he followed a predetermined process, which suggests that introducing inexperienced squad members very late to take the biggest attempt of their careers was logical and right.

That approach was confirmed by a victorious penalty decider against Switzerland four years later after a match where England spent 120 minutes looking as if they were striving to wear a pullover the wrong way round. “Our commanding performance in that penalty decider was simply exhilarating,” he states, while comparing the display to elite military units eliminating a notorious figure. Goodness.

Avoided Revelations

On the occasions we do get close to a revelation, Southgate withdraws from specifying people or sharing the juice. We discover there were difficult England squad members who insisted on more focus, perhaps because they were pampered at the start of their professional journeys. But as you expect expectantly, Southgate is already diverting into something called a leadership concept, which states that as opposed to a collection of attributes or principles, culture is in fact a phenomenon that is developed by, gah, stop, that’s sufficient.

Notable Sections

Within the better sections are when he writes about the incremental nature of fostering fortitude in the next generation, or how he tried to describe what it means to be English more coherently and more constructively than anyone else in the public eye. Most impressively, there is a really compelling description of that harrowing match in the Bulgarian capital where England’s players of color were viciously abused (and afterwards defended robustly by their coach).

Heartfelt Conclusion

Maybe the most sincere section {comes|arrives|appears