An Exercise in Passive-Aggressive Self-Defense
The soccer book is strangely dull, yet strangely compelling. Even title is confusing. Dear England currently belongs to a hit theatrical production, an forthcoming television program, and a public letter authored by Gareth Southgate in 2021.
This version of Dear England is not formally related to any of those. It represents an anomaly in the Dear England Multiverse, a volume about management: a typically uninspiring top-level coach theme that Southgate follows doggedly, relying on the words “leader”, “leading” or “management” a minimum of 500 times across the book’s entirety.
Inquiries Explored
“What are leaders? What do leaders do? What knowledge do leaders possess?” the author questions at the outset, establishing his position, but choosing not to address “How are leaders?”, questions likely saved for a second book.
Otherwise, this publication contains a notable absence at its core. It’s an attempt in subtly confrontational self-defense, in nearly but not entirely saying the actual thing, skipping nimbly from unsettled score to raw emotion across a assortment of data visualizations, corporate platitudes and discussions about 16th-century statesmen.
Reading Experience
Reading it is like listening to your parents having a controlled but deeply felt disagreement in the adjacent space while you’re trying to concentrate on a corporate presentation named “112 Reasons Why Naturally I Had the Last Laugh”. But it is also challenging to stop reading, as the author keeps drifting near to something you truly desire to hear about, before unexpectedly veering away.
Insights
Readers will find typically controversial revelations in works of this nature, due to the rapt fascination with leading the national team. The most notable instances are: he made up his mind he was definitely going to resign as England manager after supporters threw cups at him at the European Championship; he came very close to withdrawing from the game at mid-match against Bulgaria in 2019 after his team were subjected to racism; he invented the approach of set-piece coaches and everyone in the top division is now copying him; he has now abandoned his enthusiasm for the sport, a startling admission thrown away in a short passage at the final part.
Guiding England through a era of anger, hope, turmoil and confinement was a grueling ordeal. The bruises are obviously still raw.
Generic Content
In other sections, the content is flooded with an computer-generated linguistic mush of generic guidance discourse. Advanced copies of this publication were distributed with reviewers under confidentiality clauses before publication, presumably out of concern someone might reveal that “difficult conversations can, by their very essence, be difficult”, that you should always look before you leap, that management occurs where transformation combines with understanding.
Sincere Expression
Readers will find nevertheless genuine sentiment here. Managing England through a time of fury, hope, upheaval and lockdown was a harsh experience. The wounds are obviously still fresh, albeit expressed in a buzzword-filled reinterpretation of the standard coach theme: why I was actually right about each issue all along.
Specific Examples
The book’s introductory section, Trojan-horsed as gripping accounts of the deciding game of the European Championship, is completely dedicated to how good he really was at player changes (the primary Southgate gripe revolving around he was not good at substitutes). Later, he goes into significant detail about how he oversaw the championship match of 2021 impeccably – notably the unsuccessful tiebreaker – because he followed a set protocol, which suggests that throwing on inexperienced squad members very late to take the biggest kick of their careers was sensible and right.
This was proved right by a successful penalty decider against Switzerland four years later after a fixture where England spent 120 minutes looking as if they were attempting to wear a pullover the wrong way round. “Our dominance in that penalty decider was simply exhilarating,” Southgate writes, amid equating the showing to special forces eliminating a notorious figure. Goodness.
Missed Opportunities
On the occasions we come near to a disclosure, he backs away from identifying individuals or sharing the juice. We hear there were problematic England players who demanded more consideration, possibly because they were spoilt early in their time in football. But as you lean forward hopefully, Southgate is quickly shifting into an area called The Culture Code, which claims that as opposed to a collection of qualities or values, team environment is in fact a phenomenon that is created by, alas, please, we’ve heard enough.
Highlights
Within the stronger bits are when Southgate writes about the gradual nature of fostering resilience in youth, or how he sought to define what it means to be English more lucidly and more positively than any other figure in the public eye. The standout section, there is a genuinely absorbing narrative of that distressing night in the Bulgarian capital where England’s black players were targeted with hatred (and subsequently defended forcefully by their leader).
Heartfelt Conclusion
Maybe the most emotional segment {comes|arrives|appears