England’s Gareth Southgate: ‘Coming so close to a World Cup final will live with me forever – but the future is bright’

Gareth Southgate started the World Cup campaign hoping his team would make a “fresh start” and “write their own history”, but as he ends it on Saturday afternoon in St Petersburg, minds are already back on Euro ‘96, his penalty miss, the Wembley crowds, the whole story. As William Faulkner might have said of English football, “the past is never dead, it’s not even past”.

England played as if freed from the burden of history this summer, the first time that has been true since Euro 2004, if not further back than that. They only had to defend for another 22 minutes to reach Sunday’s World Cup final, before Ivan Perisic intervened, and England were eventually consigned to another semi-final exit.

Coming that close to something that special leaves some pain amid all the pride. Southgate admitted, when looking forward to Saturday’s game with Belgium, that he will never be able to shake off that memory, not fully.

“It’s been testing for me individually,” Southgate said of the last few days. “We are 20 minutes from a World Cup final. That is going to live with me forever, there is not doubt about that. I’m conscious I’ve got to raise everybody yesterday, but I’m up watching the game at 4am this morning.”

And of course it is impossible not to compare it to the pain Southgate suffered 22 years ago, at Euro ‘96. He admitted earlier this week that it took him years to be able to listen to ‘Three Lions’ because it reminded him of his Wembley heartbreak, and he would have to leave the room on it now. He has more perspective on that now, recognising it as a learning, strengthening experience any 25-year-old would benefit from.

That perspective may come in useful as Southgate evaluates this summer, and how close England came. He insisted he would not be “haunted” by the events of Wednesday night, as difficult as they have been to stomach in the aftermath. Southgate said that this exit will be “different, but no less painful” than in 1996, but he can at least provide these events with some context.

“You will always have in your mind that it is a massive game to be involved in, and to be so close is tough”, Southgate said. “But then you’ve also got to balance that with where do I think this team is, realistically, and what level do I think they are at. So I think we’ve really got a huge amount out of this group of players and they deserve massive credit.”

And Southgate benefits from the perspective of age. “I’m old enough now that I don’t have to beat myself up unnecessarily,” he said. “I think when I was a player I had a very simplistic mindset. Win I was good, lose and I was an idiot. And nothing in between and bizarrely felt the need to punish myself for that.

I’m a lot more rational now. I can see what we have achieved. Albeit when you are so close, you look back at what we might have done.”

Another reason why this year does not feel like Euro ‘96 is the fact that the 1996 team was a mixture of youth and experience. It was the last tournament for David Platt, Paul Gascoigne and Stuart Pearce, three players who came of age in Italia ‘90. All of England’s best players this summer have been in their early or mid 20s, so there is less concern that this is the end. They all hope it will be the start.

“Contextually, this is different,” Southgate explained. “In that I feel that team (1996) with all its experience, playing at home, were closer to the finished article. And I knew a lot were not going to have the chance again, and I was younger, so I didn’t have that balance and perspective in my life. Now my care is for everybody else and picking them up first and foremost, energizing them for this game.”

And once this game is over, England can start to look forward to the Nations League, and qualifying for Euro 2020. If they get there they will play all three group games at Wembley, which is where the semi-finals and final will be played too. For Southgate the prospect of playing in front of that home crowd, 24 years on from Euro ‘96, is another thrill. Especially given that most of this team were too young to have remembered that special summer.

“Of course, it’s going to be brilliant,” Southgate said. “We’re going to have a tournament the players are going to experience as close to what we experienced in 1996 and 1966. That’s incredible for everybody. We saw what the Olympics was like. And again we’ll have the players inspired by what’s happened over the last few weeks. They can see the possible impact. We did talk to them about that before, but I think it was hard for them to really get it, most of them weren’t born in 1990 and they were too young for 1996. So they haven’t really felt what the nation really getting excited about the team feels like. They’ve seen that now.”