This football book is strangely uninspiring, yet oddly captivating. Its title raises questions. The Dear England title currently names a popular play, an forthcoming TV show, and a public letter penned by the manager in 2021.
This iteration of Dear England isn’t formally connected to those. It represents an anomaly in the Dear England Multiverse, a volume about management: a typically dry elite football manager theme that the author follows relentlessly, using the words “leadership”, “guiding” or “management” no fewer than 500 times across 336 pages.
Themes Posed
“What are leaders? What do leaders do? And what do leaders know?” he asks in the opening, outlining his position, but choosing not to explore “When are leaders?”, questions probably reserved for a future volume.
Beyond that, this book has a significant gap at its core. It’s a venture in indirectly hostile self-defense, in nearly but not entirely saying the real point, skipping nimbly from unresolved issue to unscabbed wound across a collection of pie charts, business clichés and discussions about Thomas Cromwell.
Immersion
Reading it is like eavesdropping on your loved ones having a mannered but deeply felt argument in the nearby area while you’re striving to concentrate on a professional workshop called “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also challenging to put down, as the author keeps approaching to a topic you truly desire to learn about, before suddenly changing tack.
Disclosures
The book contains typically attention-grabbing disclosures in books of this nature, such is the peeled-eyeball fascination with the role of England manager. The best instances include: Southgate resolved he was certainly going to step down as England manager after fans hurled containers at him at the European Championship; he came very close to abandoning the game at half-time against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his squad members were targeted with slurs; he invented the approach of set-piece coaches and all teams in the Premier League is now following his lead; he has now lost his passion for football, a shocking confession briefly included in a brief section at the final part.
Leading England through a period of rage, optimism, political ferment and lockdown was a harsh journey. The scars are clearly still raw.
Commonplace Material
In other sections, the content is overrun with an computer-generated word-sludge of commonplace management talk. Copies of this book were distributed with journalists under secrecy pacts ahead of release, likely out of fear someone might leak that “challenging discussions can, by their inherent quality, be tough”, that you should always look before you leap, that leadership happens where transformation intersects with understanding.
Genuine Feeling
Readers will find nevertheless authentic sentiment present. Leading England through a time of anger, aspiration, turmoil and confinement was a grueling experience. The wounds are obviously still unhealed, though expressed in a jargon-laden reinvention of the traditional leader theme: how my decisions were correct about everything from the start.
Notable Cases
The publication’s opening passage, presented as exciting memories of the deciding game of the tournament, is entirely focused on how good the manager really was at substitutes (the primary Southgate gripe being he was not effective at making changes). Subsequently, he delves into extensive analysis about how he oversaw the championship match of 2021 perfectly – particularly the failed tiebreaker – because he adhered to a set protocol, which implies that throwing on young players in the closing stages to take the biggest shot of their lives was logical and correct.
This was validated by a victorious penalty decider against the Swiss team in a subsequent competition after a game where England spent the full duration looking as if they were attempting to put on a jumper the wrong way round. “Our dominance in that shootout was absolutely thrilling,” Southgate states, in between comparing the showing to elite military units eliminating Osama bin Laden. Goodness.
Withheld Details
On the occasions we approach to a revelation, the manager retreats from specifying people or sharing the details. We discover there were challenging England players who demanded more attention, possibly because they were pampered during the beginning of their professional journeys. But as you anticipate expectantly, the author is quickly diverting into a topic named a leadership concept, which asserts that rather than a assemblage of characteristics or principles, team environment is in fact a phenomenon that is created by, gah, stop, no more.
Notable Sections
Among the stronger sections are when he writes about the gradual process of fostering mental toughness in youth, or how he attempted to define national identity more clearly and more positively than anyone else in the public eye. Most impressively, there is a genuinely gripping account of that distressing evening in Sofia where England’s African heritage squad members were viciously abused (and later defended robustly by their coach).
Sincere Finale
Possibly the most sincere section {comes|arrives|appears