Gareth Southgate has a good plan but let’s not get smug

These are treasured moments. It’s very rare that England as a nation comes together as is happening now around Gareth Southgate’s side.

Sport does have that unique ability to bring people together. We witnessed this in Euro 96, of course in London 2012 and here, in Russia 2018.

However, we must not fall into a reverie at this stage and remember that so far we’ve only played Tunisia and Panama . Southgate too will be reminding his players of this.

For all that’s happened at the World Cup, the odds are still stacked against England. They’ve pulled players from the most competitive league in the world, who on balance, have been running on empty for the past few weeks of the season.

However, I sense an air of change. I can’t recall an instance when it was clear a match was won for England by half-time. At one point in the second half of the Panama match, I actually switched over to watch a bit of the cricket with England taking on the Aussies at Old Trafford in the fifth one-day international.

It is probably worth pondering we were only one newspaper article away from Sam Allardyce leading England’s footballers. Whether through judgment or default, we seem to have stumbled across a coach who seems perfectly suited to the circumstances we confront in Russia.

I remember speaking to José Mourinho a few years ago about the challenges of being an England coach. He said that if you asked the national coaching set-up in Germany, for instance, what they wanted from a left-back, they would give you any number of biomechanical and anatomical requisites. That’s not really, in his view, the case in England.

All too often our teams have consisted of players who, although at the peak of their game for their clubs, are not necessarily suited to tournament football at national level.

Southgate has broken the mould here. Not only is he very clear about the type of player he wants for every position but he has not always chosen players by Premier League form.

He is also showing us you don’t necessarily need to be a high-flying Premier League manager to shine at international level. He’s more akin to a Jurgen Klinsmann with the US or Germany’s Joachim Löw, who have got the best out of sides given the relative paucity of time they have with the players.

It’s a relief that, unlike in the past, the players have not been thrown into what always looked like pre-season training before the tournament. Instead, Southgate was right to rest his men and create calm in the camp. Clearly good work has been done in training. John Stones’s second goal was textbook.

We have the right blend of players, and, however tame the opposition, World Cup goals should never be sniffed at. They’re always hard to come by. However, we shouldn’t get carried away. There are tougher tests ahead.