Fans throwing drinks at Gareth Southgate makes this feel like his final England chapter

Increasingly, this feels like the final chapter for Southgate. While the Football Association might love the idea of him extending his contract until the 2026 World Cup, the disaffected diehards are voting with their drinks. They look at Jude Bellingham, the scintillating Real Madrid star who can launch a thousand billboards, and they ask how Southgate has turned him into an impotent background figure in just two weeks. They look at Phil Foden and Harry Kane, boasting a combined 71 goals for their clubs last season, and despair at how they have been forced into an England system that neuters them both.

The bitter truth is that England are draining the life out of a wonderful tournament. 1-0, 1-1, 0-0: that binary sequence might have been sufficient for five points in a straightforward group, but it left those in the stands all but howling at the moon. With three games that have been among the most lifeless anywhere in Germany so far, they are less the dominant force than the undisputed ugly ducklings. Fuelled by countless pints of Kolsch, Cologne’s signature beer, the travelling hordes dared hope that England might finally conjure a display with a similar stimulant effect. And, yet, once again, Southgate served up football’s answer to Mogadon.

It is an immutable fact about fandom that you should never leave your public cold. But the worry with this England team is that they are inducing nothing but ennui. It was not always this way, of course. In 2018, Southgate enjoyed such acclaim on the back of a first World Cup semi-final for 28 years that women’s magazines would herald him as the ultimate modern man. “He not only invented how we view sporting prowess,” gushed Grazia, “but also how we perceive masculinity.” Try selling that line now. Suffice it to say that most leaving Cologne Stadium were not falling over themselves to salute his alpha-male qualities.

By England’s summer of love in 2021, the cult of Gareth had lost little of its intoxicating influence. “Southgate, you’re the one, football’s coming home again,” Wembley cried, to the tune of a long-forgotten Atomic Kitten single. Here was the sorcerer, the waistcoated wonder who had transformed England from the vulgarity of Baden-Baden, where the wags were creaking under the weight of their daily designer shopping, to a unit so progressive that Fabian Delph was encouraged to leave Russia to attend the birth of his child.

Appetites have changed, though. Supporters, having had enough of toasting Southgate’s skills in cultural transformation, demand only that he converts the potential of one of the most talented crops of England players ever assembled. The evidence, as it stands, is beyond underwhelming: far from propelling them to fresh heights, he appears only to be holding them back.

There is an element of shared responsibility here. Harry Kane had led the England riposte to the fierce criticisms by Gary Lineker, who had described their 90 minutes against Denmark as “s---”, urging his fellow World Cup Golden Boot winner to remember how the pressure of wearing the shirt had felt. The trouble is that when you mount such a spirited counter-attack, you are duty-bound to follow it up with an emphatic statement. England’s toil in Cologne represented nothing of the sort, despite Kane’s blithe assurance that this was their finest showing yet.

Technically, he was right, but it was an awfully low bar to clear. While England players arrived at this championship with a licence to thrill, they have used it only to bore everyone to tears. Why do they have to be this enervating? As kick-off neared, it was difficult to overstate how much anticipation there was in the air here. The weather was glorious, the beer cellars were stocked, and a palpable thrill rippled along the concourses as news came through of the five-goal thriller between the Netherlands and Austria.

But then England played, and it was as if the air had been sucked out of the building. Bereft of imagination, low on energy, they manifested any ambition only once Kobbie Mainoo and Cole Palmer came on to inject some pace. Still, 0-0, even after the post-Denmark inquisition? This is a party that England should be elevating, but they are contriving merely to bring everyone down.