IN Dear EnglandWayne Rooney has full, dark hair – it’s clear we’re in a world of dreams and wish fulfillment. Apparently, this is a BBC drama about the England football team, from 2016 to the present, an adaptation of a play by James Graham (the game’s embargo is officially over). But it really is the story of Gareth Southgate’s England: The Garethiad, Southgate’s Epic, Penalties Lost. And it’s a true story, in four acts you’ll remember: the four tournaments played under Southgate. It was a long, hot, sudden and drunken summer. There was a massive Covid outbreak, wild euphoric and Janus-faced promise, followed by post-match chaos. It was the winter tournament, played in the desert heat. And it was the last chance, lost.
I remember the movements of each act very well. I remember some of the goals (L Shaw 2′, and forever J Bellingham, 90’+5), the dizziness and the inevitable fall. I also remember the discussion, the debate, MEANING that English football had during those tournaments. If you look closely, the football team seems to have become the embodiment of a progressive national consciousness. In short, physiologists and nutritionists seemed to vacate the technical area for writers and cultural critics. One of them was James Graham. And here we see his attempt to validate and codify the meaning he found in Southgate’s team, to turn an unassuming, unassuming man into a piece of English mythology, a saintly life for a secular age.
As part of nostalgic naturalism, an imitation of events and characters, his drama succeeds. Joseph Fiennes plays Southgate, and nails it, for better or for worse. He has the nobility of Tommy Atkins, the horse smile and that voice, like the worst Michael Caine impression ever. In 2016, Fiennes’ Southgate takes over a team in bad shape, just after we were beaten by Iceland (their manager, by comparison, balanced football around his job as a dentist in Vestmannaeyjar). And turning this bedraggled tabloid squad into a hilarious, inspiring and winning team was a major achievement and is well dramatized here. Graham’s dialogue is always watchable, in a quirky and snappy way. Southgate has quickly established himself as a protaganist angel, buying almond croissants for his staff and introducing therapeutic techniques in the dressing room to overcome England’s penalty curse. “I’m afraid of hurting people,” he tells the squad wistfully on a team-building trip to a Royal Navy training camp, and encourages them to try journaling.
But it’s like Dear England begins to assert its epic quality that quickly drags it along. It is, for one thing, incredibly long, much longer than the show: four hour-long episodes cover each tour the way famous historians cover World War II campaigns. Some of this is the result of the plot: there is an ongoing feud between Southgate and the mental health consultant he hired, ostensibly to justify Jodie Whittaker’s fee (in reality, the psychologist worked with the team for less than two years). And then there are the recreations of strike-by-strike matches. Watching your country lose on penalties is already a painful, painful affair. Try watching actors pretending to relive the event and you start to wonder what you’re doing with your life.
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Graham seems to believe he can justify this stretch because it rests on something solid: the political and social importance of Southgate’s team. This is indicated from the start, through the loaded portent: “Something went wrong in England,” Southgate says as he accepts his appointment. “Come help fix England with me,” he tells an adviser, and goes on to talk about the “long walk” to the penalty spot like he’s Nelson Mandela or something. The depth is not entirely Graham’s invention: in 2021, as England players took to the knees and racists took to Twitter, Southgate wrote his Dear England essay, a plea for empathy and tolerance, and his team became, descriptively at least, a symbol of English diversity. Some left-wing commentators spoke of “Southgatism”.
But seen in this removal – and we already know that this spirit did not really return during Euro 2024 – this phenomenon already feels period and over-defined by all those cultural critics and writers. When interpreting the symptoms of nationalism, historian Tom Nairn wrote, they “must be treated as the psychoanalyst does the outbursts of a patient”, and when “the patient roars drunkenly in the bazaar, even greater patience is required”. National football – which is almost entirely watched and debated drunkenly – should be interpreted as an expression of national consciousness with the utmost caution. But when you weigh up the legacy of Gareth Southgate’s England, you find your hands largely empty.
Here is the sports book. We didn’t win the World Cup or the Euros. And while we went further in both competitions than we had for decades, it is Southgate’s failings that are remembered and maligned now: his care in making substitutions, the weakening of the side in the dying moments of that 2021 final against Italy. Far from a great strategist, in his last tour in charge in 2024, Southgate was becoming an object of scorn among fans for his conservatism. “Fak Gareth Southgate,” my barber said to me recently as we chatted about the chances of 2026.
Southgate’s policy has not lasted. Southgate himself has largely disappeared from public life. And the documents of his moment make curiosities, not manifestos. Re-reading his ‘Dear England’ letter – which speaks of a steady, bromide-backed tolerance for the Second World War and the Queen – you can sense Southgate’s seriousness, his steady, brooding hand. But these are bonds that are thinning and fraying. I don’t remember 2021 as a lost moment of generous self-confidence. But, nevertheless, Southgate wrote: “It is clear to me that we are moving towards a much more tolerant and understanding society.” Is it still so clear today?
The English question has been vexed and gnawed at for generations, but that is no reason to think that it will suddenly yield to easy answers. The English football team and sporting success is a fitting marriage of symbol and popular sentiment – very fitting. And any writer with aspirations for a national role should know better than to pull the strings from his wild dreams.
Dear England
BBC One
(Further reading: How Britain used to laugh)
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