It is January 2006 and
Middlesbrough are away at Arsenal in the Premier League. It is Boro’s final visit to Highbury before Arsenal leave their historic home. Boro are struggling, they have not won a league game for two months and a surge of injuries mean manager Steve McClaren turns to the club’s academy.
McClaren starts five former youth team players and brings on three more from the bench. Middlesbrough can still name the likes of Mark Viduka, Gaizka Mendieta and Yakubu at kick-off, but the blend of youth and experience do not gel. Arsenal win 7-0.
Gareth Southgate was Middlesbrough’s club captain. He had been since joining Boro five years earlier as McClaren’s first and cornerstone signing. Southgate was one of the injured. He travelled to London nevertheless and when this Highbury demolition was over, he made for the visitors’ dressing room. Lee Cattermole was 17, David Wheater was 18, Matthew Bates was 19. There were six teenagers in Boro shirts. Thierry Henry had run all over them, scored a hat-trick.
Upstairs in the directors’ box, Middlesbrough chairman Steve Gibson was a worried man. Gibson’s greatest concern was that the scale of the defeat could have a shattering impact on the progress of youth.
“Those lads were on the floor,” Gibson tells
The Athletic. “Steve had put in a lot of local youngsters and they were hit hard. Gareth went into the dressing room and — on behalf of the senior players, who’d let them down — apologised to the youngsters. Gareth lifted them, got them back. A lot of those players went on to have fabulous careers. Gareth was very much our skipper.”
For Gibson, this was the definition of dressing-room leadership, the reason Boro had pushed to get Southgate from Aston Villa in the first place.
“When I appointed Steve McClaren in 2001, the first thing he said to me was: ‘I’ve watched Middlesbrough, I know Middlesbrough and you need a leader. The leader I want is Gareth Southgate’.”
Gibson’s reaction was: “Bloody hell, Steve, that’s a huge ask.
Southgate was McClaren’s marquee signing in 2001 (Photo: Steve Morton/EMPICS via Getty Images)
“Gareth was playing for England, for
Villa. But Steve said it would transform the club if we got Gareth. We worked our socks off, we got Gareth. And Steve was absolutely right, Gareth did transform our club. His standard of professionalism ran right through the club, no compromise on those standards on and off the pitch. On the pitch he was tough as they come, people forget that about him. He has inner strength. The old saying about leaving nothing on the pitch? Well, Gareth never left anything there. He was completely trustworthy. You knew what you were going to get out of him every game.”
Southgate spent over eight years at Middlesbrough, first as player-leader, then as manager, successor to McClaren. He joined from Villa for £6.5 million aged 30 in July 2001. He led Boro to cup finals and a trophy and in 2004-05 to seventh in the Premier League. In his latter role, Southgate had three full seasons in charge and the start of a fourth before his dismissal in October 2009. In our collective memory there tends to be a focus on the end in the Championship, but in Southgate’s first season as a manager (he started the campaign aged 35), Middlesbrough finished 12th in the Premier League.
Southgate, 50, returns to the Riverside Stadium this week. Approaching five years in the England job, he will receive a warm welcome from Teesside, where he is remembered as a player for, among many things, walking to all four stands alone at the end of matches and punching the air to thank and to gee up fans. A sardonic man, Southgate would think sometimes they needed it. After some of Boro’s performances, they did.
But Southgate gave them plenty. Middlesbrough have won one major honour since their founding in 1876 and it was the 2004 League Cup. Southgate was the captain in Cardiff. Boro have played in Europe in only two seasons and both had Southgate wearing the armband. He was captain in the May 2006 UEFA Cup final in Eindhoven against Sevilla. These were the club’s golden years and Southgate was an essential element.
Simultaneously, however, these were disruptive times. McClaren often seemed to be on his way out just as Middlesbrough moved through round after round of cup competitions (Boro also reached the FA Cup semi-final in 2006). Fans grew agitated at his perceived anti-football, players moaned and youth was promoted. It was a paradox encapsulated in the 16 weeks that separated Highbury from Eindhoven, from a domestic thumping to a European final.
Southgate was in the middle of it. After the Arsenal 7-0, he was back in the team for a 4-0 home defeat by Villa, which was even more traumatic. Somehow Boro then scrambled to defeat Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea champions 3-0. That left them 16th in the table with a relegation clash at Bryan Robson’s West Brom next and before it, Southgate sat at the Rockliffe training ground and talked candidly.
He had — and still has — the image of a fundamentally nice man. It is something he jokes about. But no one survives more than three decades in an environment as fierce as football without being sharp. As Middlesbrough’s long-serving chief executive Keith Lamb once said: “He may look as if butter would not melt, but you don’t have the playing career he had without being tough. In many respects Gareth’s a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing.”
That might be an analogy too far, but it is an opinion from the inside. Southgate’s natural self-deprecating humour remains prominent, but he is a realist, too, and at Middlesbrough, and Villa and Crystal Palace before then, there was a quiet cynicism. It is there in the phrase he used about professional football: “I love it, but I don’t like it.”
Given Gibson’s anxiety about the young players at Highbury, it is poignant to re-read Southgate’s comments on youth, ethics and the Villa 4-0, when a Boro fan ran on and threw his season ticket at McClaren in the dugout and Cattermole walked off in tears.
“I still love the dream of football,” Southgate said. “I’ve just taken coaching badges and I love the fact that the 13-year-olds who came in were wide-eyed, fascinated by the professionals’ work. I was on Southampton’s books as a kid and I remember going to watch their first team train, Kevin Keegan, Mick Channon, people like that. You were open-mouthed. That side of football I still love and my boy will have that innocence — until I fill him in on the reality. I still love the game and love playing. But everything else that’s around it, I don’t have to like.”
The “everything else” included premature wealth and entitlement from players and “things that are unethical about the business of football”. Southgate said the January transfer window had brought “unrest” inside Middlesbrough, an unusual term and a political one for a club captain to use. But Southgate’s antennae had picked this up because he understood. He had been there.
At Villa in the summer of 2000, Southgate, the captain, had wanted to leave so much he submitted a transfer request, first verbal, then written. As expected, this did not please fans, nor did it go down well inside Villa Park. Southgate’s decision had been career-based and seemingly hard-faced; but he was to realise his hardness was soft in comparison to others. Villa chairman Doug Ellis told him: “I’m not prepared to accept your transfer request. So, politely, I’m telling you to **** off.”
Manager John Gregory was no easier and although Chelsea and Deportivo La Coruna were willing to meet any Villa valuation, Southgate was forced to stay another year — unhappily — then move to Boro. Later when discussing Gregory, Southgate would comment: “If you don’t have something good to say about someone, better to say nothing. Ideally, I should stop now.”
Villa’s support did not consider Southgate nice. When he first returned with Boro in November 2001, the reception was fractious. It was the same day Sol Campbell first returned to White Hart Lane with Arsenal and the two were seen as a pair. It’s not always been waistcoats and appreciation and when Villa won 4-0 at the Riverside, the travelling fans sang: “Southgate, Southgate, what’s the score?”
A fortnight later that result and the ongoing uncertainty at Middlesbrough meant he was in a questioning mood. “Villa was a horrible atmosphere,” Southgate said. “I’ve been involved in first-team football for 15 years and I don’t remember an afternoon like that, where it was so awful. Real tension, a fan running at the manager, a young player breaking into tears on the field. I was relegated twice at Crystal Palace, we had defeats and difficult times. But I don’t remember an afternoon where I felt quite so affected as by that Villa game. So for me to feel that, how did the younger ones feel?”
This is one Riverside memory, but Southgate set it against achievements. “While I’ve never experienced as bad an afternoon as Villa, I’ve never experienced the emotion of Cardiff, because of the length of the wait, because we’d never won anything before. There were people who’d been coming for 50 years who’d never thought they’d see the day. They were in tears.”
And in the most contradictory of seasons, Middlesbrough, via Massimo Maccarone, were delivering two of the most unforgettable nights in the club’s history. In the UEFA Cup quarter-final second leg at the Riverside against Basel, three goals down on aggregate, Boro won 4-3. Maccarone got the 90th-minute winner. In the semi-final second leg at the Riverside against Steaua Bucharest, three goals down on aggregate, Boro again won 4-3. Maccarone got the 89th-minute winner.
Maccarone celebrates his winner against Steaua in 2006 (Photo: Owen Humphreys – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)
These were electric occasions, celebrated today in writing on the way to the stadium. Yet it was indicative of Middlesbrough’s season and the football politics of the moment that the semi-final triumph for McClaren came on the day the Football Association offered Luiz Felipe Scolari the England job. McClaren had been the prime contender. He and Boro thought he was going to the FA.
It is a period Gibson remembers vividly, if not fondly: “People forget just how short a period of time it was. Steve was leaving to go to England, then he wasn’t because the FA went for the Brazilian (Scolari). He let them down, then the FA came back for Steve. It was about three weeks before the UEFA Cup final. Steve had actually signed a new contract with us. Then the FA didn’t get Scolari and came back for Steve. Dropped me right in it.”
The FA announced McClaren’s appointment as Sven-Goran Eriksson’s successor on May 4, six days before the UEFA Cup final. Middlesbrough needed a manager. Quickly.
“It was interesting because at the time I was talking to Terry Venables,” Gibson says. “Terry said to me: ‘The answer might be under your nose’.
“If you look at what Gareth achieved here as a player, he was a leader, no doubt about that. Not only that, people followed. That is really important, Gareth took people with him. I did my search, I spoke to many. Gareth… it was always going to be a risk. It was a big ask from me to him. He was still a player, still our skipper and I asked him to say goodbye to all of that to manage our football club.”
In Eindhoven, Boro lost 4-0 to an excellent Sevilla side featuring Dani Alves and Javier Saviola. Middlesbrough’s team was good, too, and it was 1-0 until 12 minutes from time. But it was the end of an era. It was also the end of a tumultuous 64-game season and unknown to Southgate, who had one year left on his contract, it was the end of his playing career. He was 35.
He wished McClaren well, not least because he is English. Southgate had retired from England in 2004 with 57 caps, one of which was earned at the Riverside against Slovakia in Euro 2004 qualification. With speculation rising about Eriksson’s replacement, before the West Brom game, Southgate was asked for his opinion and he replied: “I would like an Englishman on the basis that I think international football should be about a team and coaches from your country competing against those from another country. Otherwise, what’s the difference from club football?
“And my attitude would be: if you don’t have a good enough manager from your own country, train one. I’ve no problem with foreign managers at club level, no problem. But with England I want an Englishman who’s going to say: ‘Remember Churchill’.”
It was not a sudden lurch into jingoism, and was not said that way. Nor was it, if memory serves, sarcastic. It was more a reflection of Southgate’s serious but smiling patriotism.
On June 7, 2006 — less than a month after Eindhoven — Middlesbrough announced Southgate as their new manager. It did not go down well. The League Managers’ Association objected, saying Southgate lacked the necessary Pro Licence. “They can’t do it, it’s as simple as that,” said the LMA.
Middlesbrough could do it, and did. Abruptly, Southgate went from “Gate”, his nickname, to “Gaffer”. When, in his first squad meeting, he informed the players of the name change, that this was how it had to be, Ray Parlour asked if “big nose” would be acceptable. Once Southgate would have laughed but he could not now and Parlour, a senior player, was soon at Hull.
Decision-making had begun and in August 2006, Southgate named his first competitive starting XI as a manager:
Mark Schwarzer; Stuart Parnaby, Chris Riggott, Emanuel Pogatetz; James Morrison, Fabio Rochemback, George Boateng, Julio Arca, Stewart Downing; Mark Viduka, Yakubu.
The game was at Reading and after 21 minutes Middlesbrough were 2-0 up. Whatever Southgate had said in his first team talk was working. “What a start, I was feeling pretty comfortable,” Gibson says. Then shortly before half-time, Reading scored twice. Ten minutes into the second half Leroy Lita hit Reading’s third. Boro lost 3-2.
Viduka had a late equaliser overruled for offside and “definitely onside” was Southgate’s verdict. He was speaking like a manager even if he did not yet feel like one. He had been on holiday when Gibson had offered the job. “I knew it was a brilliant opportunity, and one that might not come my way again,” Southgate later said. “But it was a stressful one. All of a sudden, I was on a fast track of learning. Every meeting I was in and every experience was brand new to me. Nothing I’d done up to that point in my life had really prepared me for any of it. I couldn’t hide from that. I think everybody knew I wasn’t completely ready.”
Southgate finished 12th but things unravelled after that (Photo: Matthew Lewis/Getty Images)
Southgate’s honesty helps explain why he takes people with him.
In November, the Premier League relented and said he could continue in his new role. By February 2007, when Reading were beaten at the Riverside, Boro were 12th and would stay there. Elsewhere, though, a storm was coming. It sounds unlikely a collapse in the American housing market would affect Middlesbrough’s transfer policy but, as Gibson explains, it did.
“That first season was a transition,” Gibson says. “Also for Gareth, he became manager of the club when things began to get difficult financially, not just at Middlesbrough, all across football. We had the 2007 financial crash, banks were becoming very difficult to deal with. The global economics were horrific. We had to rein in our spending. It was difficult. We ran the club on a tighter budget than other managers had enjoyed.”
Boro balanced the books that summer of 2007, selling Yakubu to Everton and bringing in Jonathan Woodgate from Real Madrid and Mido from Tottenham. Both were injury-prone. Boro fell into the bottom three in December and in January Gibson fought the market by signing Brazilian striker Afonso Alves from Heerenveen for a club-record £12 million. Alves had his moments, scoring twice in a 2-2 draw with Manchester United and a hat-trick in the 8-1 demolition of Manchester City on the season’s final afternoon. Boro were 13th.
“We finished the season scoring 15 goals in the last six games,” Gibson says. “We left that season with a lot of optimism and we started the next season (2008-09) with a lot of optimism. After a few games we were in the top six. We started strong, but then we had a succession of injuries. We’d a really tough period when we were down to the bare bones.”
Eighth in November 2008, Boro did not win again until the end of February. They were relegated on the last day at Upton Park. Only three players had started 30 or more league games. Mido started five.
“I know how hard Gareth worked but it just felt as if circumstances were working against us,” Gibson says. “He had to learn very quick. It’s very easy to be political and there were a lot of politics around his appointment. What we had was a skipper with unbelievable leadership qualities but no managerial experience. Gareth’s very intelligent and he had to learn fast. We, the club, had some responsibility for what went on, tightening the budget. We perhaps knew what was needed but we didn’t have the means to resolve it. Plus, the horrendous injury run, if we hadn’t had them, I’m pretty sure we’d have stayed up.”
Middlesbrough had spent 11 consecutive seasons in the Premier League. They raised around £30 million in sales such as Downing to Villa. Lita arrived on a free from Reading.
The Championship season began with five wins and a draw in the first seven matches. But game eight was a 5-0 home defeat by West Brom that Gibson mentions today. It was the first of three consecutive home defeats and although the next home game was won 2-0 against Derby, a boardroom choice had been made. The Derby attendance was 17,000, half-capacity and Boro’s lowest at the Riverside for a league game. It was Southgate’s last match in charge.
“We lost 5-0 at home to West Brom and I just felt the momentum was in the wrong direction,” Gibson says. “Before the start of the season I’d been very honest with everyone, we got all of the coaching staff in and I said to them: ‘I don’t think you deserve what happened last season and I trust you. But if there’s any time in the coming season when I feel we’re not going to be very competitive in this league, I will think about making changes’. I told everyone. That’s what I ended up implementing.
“It was harsh on Gareth but football is harsh. It was a very, very difficult decision. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I thought I was doing the right thing but it probably proved in the long term not to be the right decision.”
Southgate’s last Boro starting XI was: Brad Jones; Justin Hoyte, Sean St. Ledger, David Wheater, Rhys Williams, Joe Bennett; Gary O’Neil, Didier Digard; Jeremie Aliadiere, Leroy Lita, Adam Johnson.
They were fourth in the Championship, one point off top, when the dismissal came. Southgate was stunned, but Gordon Strachan had been lined up. Boro faded under Strachan and finished 11th.
Southgate signed Woodgate (Photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
When, nine years later, Southgate was England’s manager at the World Cup in Russia, he said: “I knew my record with Middlesbrough would be held against me, even though, for me, what I achieved with them in the first two years is better than anything I’ve done in the last couple of weeks… really it was too early for me.”
Last December, speaking to students in Manchester, he added: “It was the failure that happened at the beginning that actually taught me where I needed to improve. I needed to go away and learn more about how managing and coaching worked by taking part in courses like this one and getting more qualifications. The outcome of this work and the confidence I built eventually led to me managing the England team.”
Southgate could have written a book about his time at Middlesbrough and, in fact, in 2003 his joint autobiography with Andy Woodman was published. Woodman, a team-mate from his Palace days, is father of Freddie, playing for Swansea at Wembley this afternoon. Southgate is Freddie’s godfather.
In the book, Southgate lists Venables as his favourite coach and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as his favourite film — “an everyday tale of football folk”. His selections may have changed since. Or maybe not. But he is back at the Riverside and as the England manager preparing for a major tournament. He returns as an experienced coach with the necessary qualifications and the willingness to make decisions. Joe Hart and Jack Wilshere were omitted from the World Cup three years ago and
six players will be cut from the initial 33 on Teesside.
“I’m delighted,” Gibson says of the venue for England’s warm-up. “The period Gareth had here, I hope he enjoyed. He’ll always go down here as the skipper who lifted our only trophy. He took us into Europe, got us the most points and highest finish in the Premier League. When I think of Gareth I like to reflect on all those positives. Even though we were relegated, there were exceptional circumstances and he didn’t have that bad a record, actually. We probably had six bad weeks in three and a half years. But that was so expensive to the club, to everyone. He was phenomenal for us. He led us through seven of the most successful years in the club’s history. He was our leader.”
(Top photo: Pool/Getty Images)
theathletic.com
