It is judgment time for Southgate even if basing it on this final or Spain’s superiority is tough

John Stones collapsed onto his back and gazed up at the stars. Declan Rice sunk to his knees. Phil Foden slumped in the dugout, staring into the far distance. Jude Bellingham strode over to the England bench and took his anger out on a blue bucket of ice cold drinks. Cole Palmer came over and sat on it. A staff member apologetically moved the ice around with his foot.

This is what it looks like when the dreams of a lifetime are shattered, not just once, but for the second time in three years.

For the past few weeks, England have looked like they had destiny on their side, as if they were being protected by an aura which was guiding them through the tournament, and maybe all the way into the history books. How else to explain their run of implausible comebacks, their rescuing by individual acts of heroism, which had taken them all the way to Berlin? And after Palmer produced yet another brilliant equaliser in the final, and the stadium was a wall of English noise, you could easily believe that they were on the way to the greatest comeback of them all.

But if England believed they had finally turned into a winning machine, that they had developed the ominous inevitability of an international Real Madrid, then it was with immense shock, pain and then tears that they realised it was their opponents who were the winning machine after all. Because if England were hoping to rely on momentum and magic in those final minutes, it was Spain who kept their heads and scored the winning goal.

Victory would have made this team immortal, but this defeat will echo through history, too. Everyone here knew this was a defining moment for English football for better or worse, the climax of the Southgate era, the chance to end what has become one of the longest and most important losing streaks in sport.

Of course, now there will be plenty of despairing phone-ins and painful Wyscout hours. People will demand recriminations, a full accounting for why England failed to win again. This is what we want from finals, definitive judgments, belated clarity on the questions we had all worried over. And this game was set up to give us that final clarity on Southgate, on the past eight years, on whether Gazball has been England’s method of progress or the one thing holding it back.

But ultimately this was still only one 90-minute football match, a messy contingent place where nothing is quite as inevitable as you might think.

Clearly Spain were better than England, significantly so. They have been the best team this tournament, playing with a mixture of controlled possession and incisive wingers that makes them look like a high-spec club side. If you put all the magical thinking to one side for a minute, England were clearly up against it. They had one less day to prepare, their last-16 and quarter-finals both went to extra time and, most importantly of all, they had not been playing nearly as well as their opponents.

So England came in with a plan. They looked happy to sit back and defend in a 4-5-1, with Bukayo Saka covering Kyle Walker as an additional full-back. They wanted to stop Spain from turning possession into chances and in the first half they did this brilliantly. Their organisation was immaculate, their tackling and blocking heroic. At half-time you might well have imagined Southgate would be the happier manager.

But there were two problems. First, that England had offered almost nothing with the ball at all. Secondly, they were doing so much defending that it would be almost impossible to be perfect all night. Sure enough, two minutes after the restart, they switched off once and went behind.

It took Southgate’s brave substitutions to get them back into the game, Ollie Watkins for Harry Kane, who looked as blunt as he did in Tottenham’s 2019 Champions League final defeat by Liverpool. And then Palmer for Kobbie Mainoo. Three minutes later, Palmer had drawn England level. It felt for a few minutes as if history was turning England’s way. It turned out they were running on empty.

So what do we make of all this? Because ultimately we do need some Southgate conclusions, some final judgements from this. It feels unfair to blame him for England’s defeat when they were beaten by such an obviously superior team. Some people will say that the first-half game plan was too negative, that if England had taken the game to Spain they could have disrupted the passing at source rather than sitting back and waiting for a bounce of the ball to go their way.

Maybe, but it would have taken a brave manager to play high up the pitch against Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams and an even braver one to press high in a final at the end of an exhausting tournament. England’s plan was negative, but it might still have been the best plan to keep them in the game for as long as possible. It just needed them to be perfect and they were not.

Playing high is a dangerous strategy against players such as Williams (Edith Geuppert – GES Sportfoto/Getty Images)

If you were being kind to Southgate, you could say England put in more of a fight here than they did in their final defeat to Italy three years ago, when they were 1-0 up against a canny but not spectacular team, lost their nerve, drew the game and lost on penalties. Tonight, at least England were up against a great side, fought their way off the passing carousel and got back into the game.

You could even point to Southgate’s bravery from the bench, getting Watkins and Palmer on, as an improvement he has made from 2021. Although with Watkins looking so much sharper than Kane, you might reasonably ask whether it should have been Watkins playing from the start. Nothing that Kane did in his hour on the pitch suggested he should have started the game.

Ultimately what connects tonight with the Italy final, as well as the players’ pain at watching their opponents lift the trophy, is a fundamental failure to keep the ball in the highest pressure moments. Southgate was very frank afterwards that this was the problem. He pointed to the extenuating circumstances, the physical load on the players, the issues in the squad, but he also knows they only mitigate so far. “We have to hold our hands up: Spain were better,” Southgate said. “In the end, that’s the long and short of it.”

The reasons Spain are able to play like that and England are not are so deep-rooted that it feels unfair to pin them on Southgate’s decisions this month. But after eight years in the job and two lost finals, no matter how narrow the margins in those games, many fans will return to England on Monday wondering if a different manager might have a fresh approach to solving them.

(Top photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)