{"id":207239,"date":"2025-06-23T08:40:14","date_gmt":"2025-06-23T08:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/207239\/"},"modified":"2025-06-23T08:40:14","modified_gmt":"2025-06-23T08:40:14","slug":"the-next-england-manager-the-carsley-campaign-starts-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/207239\/","title":{"rendered":"The next England manager? The Carsley campaign starts here"},"content":{"rendered":"

An underlying narrative this coming season \u2013 which will probably run until the World Cup \u2013 is the identity of the next England manager, assuming Thomas Tuchel cannot help England win.<\/p>\n

Things can change quickly but we currently look well short of the required standard. That doesn\u2019t mean we will fail, of course; one of football\u2019s ornery qualities is turning the well short of standard into winners, much to the perplexed chagrin of some who crave logic and order from the chaos.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s assume the usual thing happens and at some point we get beaten by France, Spain, Portugal or Germany. Bye bye Skeletor. Next!<\/p>\n

READ: England still high in World Cup favourites list after Senegal defeat<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Tradition dictates that the new appointee is in some way the opposite of the last. The elite manager route didn\u2019t work, so we don\u2019t want another of those. Graham Potter, once a favourite, has been West Hammed and proven to have feet of clay. Eddie Howe then? He might be a possibility but there\u2019s zero proof he\u2019d be any better than anyone else. I suppose he doesn\u2019t seem to mind working for hideous regimes, so he should fit right in. But does he want to stop sucking on the autocratic breast?<\/p>\n

A good foreigner? Tried that, no. Anyway that approach neglects the fact that being an international manager requires very different skills than being at a club.<\/p>\n

So can we lavish money on a proven international manager? Probably, but we already have one. Why not Lee Carsley? Surely not rejected for football reasons. His work with the U21s is exemplary, having won one Euros (does it or should it count for nothing?) and just reached the current semi-final, beating favourites Spain 3-1 with an inexperienced squad, robbed of some players at the last moment.<\/p>\n

He is very proactive in-game and makes good substitutions. That one loss as caretaker first team manager<\/strong><\/a>, where he tried something new against Greece and lost 2-1 to a last-minute goal, fatally blotted his copy book. But are we really so precious we can\u2019t tolerate this? It was a poor performance but has it been markedly better since? Was it worse than losing 3-1 to Senegal? Don\u2019t give me successful club managers\u2026 they\u2019ve shown to be largely irrelevant to international football.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe he showed a lack of football intelligence, his results must prove that. His problem was one of image. He was too \u2018ordinary\u2019. Too grunt labour. Marks & Spencer would not endorse a Lee Carsley waistcoat. These things appear to matter. Plus there is an innate, inane bias against Birmingham accents. You might think that\u2019s shallow and ridiculous but survey after survey rate it as the worst accent in the land and a marker for stupidity. Ask any Brummie, they are consistently patronised. Try establishing a call centre there. This definitely counted against him in the public mind. Being a polyglot Bavarian, fine. Come from the West Midlands, no chance.<\/p>\n

He talks quite earnestly and does look like the sort of tracksuit manager whose wife sends him off to work saying \u201cyou\u2019re good, just believe in yourself more, Lee, l0ve\u201d. But his U21 record suggests a well-liked popular manager with more creative flexibility than is usual. Do we just ignore that for someone successful at league football? If so, why? Show your working. I mean who would you like in midfield: Angel Gomes or Jordan Henderson?<\/p>\n

READ: England World Cup ladder makes us almost cry as Henderson too high for comfort<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In life, we know there are plenty of vocally confident, thrusting people who talk a good game but are no better than anyone else, often worse, but they get on because they present well to people who can\u2019t look deeper. Let\u2019s call them public schoolboys.<\/p>\n

Even now, surface is everything, so much so that England elected an incompetent narcissistic fool as Prime Minister purely because of how he presented. He was assumed to be more intelligent than he proved to be. It was obvious to some of us but not to plenty who even subconsciously assumed posh people are clever. Wrong. Some of the most intellectually adrift people can get into positions of power just on networking and how they present themselves. How else to explain the creation called Jacob Rees Mogg, whose stupidity is unmeasurable. If he was working class from Middlesbrough he\u2019d have had no chance of being in government. This isn\u2019t really even political, it\u2019s classist, going back to agrarian days of manual workers doffing the cap to landowners.<\/p>\n

If you employ a German, you bypass the snobbery because we have no idea of Tuchel\u2019s class.<\/p>\n

But why are we overlooking someone already proven at international level? It has to be a non-football reason. Surely that\u2019s what we need? Everyone can have one bad game. We appear to tolerate this with Tuchel, why not Lee? Show me the best managers and I\u2019ll show you a bad game. Everyone has them but we don\u2019t judge their body of work by it.<\/p>\n

And does pathway and development for players and managers not count for anything? The \u2018just buy success\u2019 notion might work at league level where economic bias is endemic but applies less, at least to an extent, in cup football. You\u2019d think the FA would realise this simply by having their eyes open.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I love a minor key, slightly melancholic Brummie accent and would take it every day above someone affecting a faux aristocratic voice or that of a dangerous bumbling posh thicky who doesn\u2019t understand the difference between intelligence and education. I wish everyone felt the same. Believing in supposedly well-spoken fools hasn\u2019t exactly worked out well, has it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An underlying narrative this coming season \u2013 which will probably run until the World Cup \u2013 is the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5008],"tags":[748,393,163,4884,225,83215,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-207239","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-england","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-front-page","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-home-page","13":"tag-johnny-nic","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114731786287308409","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}