English football managers' gate theatre

I have to say that, all those centuries past, it was very far-seeing and considerate of his ancestors to arrange for the new England manager to come among us in 2016 with a ‘gate’ already appended to his surname, thus sparing journalists the effort of having to add the same four letters if – when? - his reign goes, as it were, south.

When it comes to managing England, there are plenty of precedents for crash and burn on a blockbuster scale, of which Glenn Hoddle’s views on the transmigration of souls and Sam Allardyce’s start-stop tenure are only the most exotic. Throw in everything else from metatarsals to serial failure from the penalty spot, and from ‘the wally with the brolly’ to Iceland at Euro 2016, and all the warnings from football history would seem to add up to a collective scream of ‘don’t even think about it’ at Gareth Southgate.

Who’d be a manager anyway? Arsene Wenger has famously likened the job to “living on a volcano” and only this week our own Kevin Doyle, even as he stated his intention to do his coaching badges when he hangs up his boots, was expressing severe reservations about taking the big step into management.