An Exercise in Indirectly Hostile Self-Defense

The soccer publication is oddly tedious, yet strangely captivating. Even title causes confusion. The Dear England title currently belongs to a popular play, an future television program, and a open letter written by Gareth Southgate in 2021.

This edition of Dear England is not formally related to those. It exists as an peculiar entry in the Dear England Multiverse, a book about leadership: a typically uninspiring top-level coach trope that Southgate adheres to persistently, employing the words “leader”, “guiding” or “management” no fewer than 500 times across 336 pages.

Themes Explored

“What are leaders? What do leaders do? What knowledge do leaders possess?” he asks in the opening, outlining his stall, but stopping short to address “How are leaders?”, themes probably set aside for a future volume.

Beyond that, this book has a significant gap throughout. It’s an attempt in passive-aggressive self-justification, in nearly but not entirely saying the actual thing, jumping nimbly from lingering grievance to unscabbed wound across a assortment of pie charts, management jargon and discussions about historical figures.

Engagement

Engaging with the text is like listening to your parents having a mannered but profoundly personal disagreement in the next room while you’re trying to focus on a corporate presentation called “112 Reasons Why Naturally I Had the Last Laugh”. But it is also impossible to disengage, as the author keeps drifting near to an issue you genuinely want to discover, before suddenly shifting focus.

Revelations

The book contains always news headlines in publications like these, due to the intense interest with England managerdom. The most notable instances include: the manager decided he was absolutely going to resign as England manager after spectators threw cups at him at the European Championship; he came very close to abandoning the game at mid-match against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his players were racially abused; he introduced the idea of dedicated restart experts and everyone in the Premier League is now copying him; he has now lost his passion for soccer, a surprising confession casually mentioned in a single paragraph at the final part.

Leading England through a time of fury, optimism, upheaval and lockdown was a brutal journey. The wounds are clearly still raw.

Predictable Elements

Otherwise, the text is flooded with an AI-style linguistic mush of generic management talk. Advanced copies of this publication were provided with journalists under non-disclosure agreements before release, probably out of fear someone might reveal that “difficult conversations can, by their nature, be difficult”, that you should always think before you act, that guidance happens where transformation meets understanding.

Genuine Feeling

Readers will find nonetheless genuine emotion within. Leading England through a time of anger, hope, turmoil and lockdown was a grueling journey. The scars are clearly still raw, though presented in a buzzword-filled reinterpretation of the standard leader narrative: why I was actually right about everything from the start.

Specific Examples

The publication’s opening passage, Trojan-horsed as thrilling accounts of the deciding game of the European Championship, is all about how successful Southgate in fact was at player changes (the primary Southgate gripe revolving around he was not good at making changes). Subsequently, he goes into great depth about how he handled the championship match of 2021 flawlessly – particularly the unsuccessful penalty shootout – because he adhered to a established procedure, which implies that introducing young players very late to take the crucial attempt of their lives was sensible and correct.

This was proved right by a victorious penalty decider against the Swiss team at a later tournament after a match where England spent 120 minutes looking as if they were striving to don a sweater the inside out. “Our commanding performance in that tiebreaker was simply exhilarating,” he notes, amid comparing the performance to special forces killing a notorious figure. Goodness.

Avoided Revelations

On the occasions we do get close to a disclosure, he withdraws from specifying people or providing the substance. We hear there were problematic England squad members who required more focus, maybe because they were pampered during the beginning of their time in football. But as you lean forward eagerly, he is quickly veering off into something called a leadership concept, which asserts that rather than a collection of qualities or principles, team environment is in fact an element that is formed by, gah, stop, we’ve heard enough.

Strengths

Within the better bits are when Southgate discusses about the piecemeal method of developing fortitude in the next generation, or how he tried to describe what it means to be English more clearly and more helpfully than anyone else in the public eye. The standout section, there is a truly absorbing account of that traumatic evening in the Bulgarian capital where England’s black players were subjected to vile treatment (and afterwards protected forcefully by their leader).

Heartfelt Conclusion

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