sport news OLIVER HOLT: Gareth Southgate will have worked wonders if England get to the ... trends now

A few years ago, in the months after England lost to Iceland at Euro 2016, a strange thing happened to the country’s view of the national team. 

We found ourselves in a strange and unaccustomed state, a place in which we really ought to have discovered shelter earlier. For a brief moment in time, we attained humility.

Bitter experiences at major tournaments, one after another, will do that to a nation eventually. For more than 20 years after Euro 96, England’s ceiling was the last eight. The quarter-finals were the good times. 

England were also knocked out in the group phase (2000 and 2014), the first knockout phase (1998, 2004, 2010, 2012 and 2016) and did not qualify for the tournament at all (2008).

Losing to Iceland in Nice in the second round at Euro 2016, and the tepid, timid, frightened manner of the England display there, felt like a nadir. And it finally seemed to dial down expectations. 

Thoughts of winning tournaments felt like exotic dreams rather than the birthright of a team said to represent the home of football.

We joked about our chances at the 2018 World Cup. Most were agreed that getting to the second round would represent modest progress. We learned to be self-deprecating. We learned to stop assuming superiority. 

We learned that other countries were actually really rather good. We accepted that many of them were light years ahead of us in their technical accomplishment.

Then Gareth Southgate went and ruined it all. That’s all he’s ever done. Ruined things. He took a young, raw, unfancied squad to Russia and led it to the semi-finals. And then in the next tournament, he led the England team, via knockout victories against Germany, Ukraine and Denmark, to the final of Euro 2020, where they lost, on penalties, to Italy.

And in a puff of smoke, the humility disappeared. And entitlement had a spectacular renaissance. Now, the common belief appears to be that not only should England have won the World Cup in 2018 but we should have won the Euros last year, too. 

Our players were that good, apparently. So good that it was only that idiot Southgate that cost us. If it had been anyone else in charge — Sven Goran Eriksson, Fabio Capello, anyone at all — we’d have walked it. 

Both times. Without Southgate in charge, in fact, we’d be going for a third successive tournament victory in Qatar and we’d be the damn favourites, too. To hear a lot of the talk, reaching the final should be the minimum achievement with this set of players. 

Never mind that two of our first-choice central defenders aren’t in the best starting XI at their clubs and the others might be seen as easy meat for the best attackers in the world.

The idea that this World Cup — like the previous two major tournaments — would be ours for the taking were it not for the bloke in charge is an interesting hypothesis. I’m sorry if this sounds pessimistic but have you seen the Brazil squad? 

Even the most negative predictions seem to centre on the assumption that England will make the quarter-finals, where they may face the reigning champions, France. That is based on the presumption that Southgate’s side get out of the group. And yes, logic and rationale suggest that is a fair assumption.

BUT the idea we should breeze past likely opponents Holland or Senegal in the second round, in particular, feels

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