It was probably a good thing that the penalty shoot-out ended after every five shooters. Because England coach Gareth Southgate would not have been able to maintain the inner logic that he had apparently come up with for this competition. The dramaturgy followed a very innovative script: Southgate’s leading actors grew younger with every shot. First Marcus Rashford, 23, then Jadon Sancho, 21, finally Bukayo Saka, 19 – the next one should have been Jude Bellingham, he has just turned 18. However, Southgate had forgotten to replace him.
It was easy to lose track of things in the last few minutes of this tournament. Substitute player Jordan Henderson was suddenly replaced again. Substitute player Jack Grealish hobbled around a little and then stayed. Kyle Walker, a veteran, was substituted off just before routine was called for. Then came Rashford and Sancho. They came to shoot.
For neutral viewers, it is definitely nice when a game ends up being wild and adventurous. It’s not nice when a non-neutral trainer deliberately rushes his people into such a battle picture. Gareth Southgate, who missed a crucial penalty himself in 1996, should have known better.
This EM was a coaching tournament. In the end, two teams came through that were closely accompanied and coherently composed by their coaches Roberto Mancini and Gareth Southgate over a long period of time and, for seven tournament games, gave the impression that they could not imagine anything better than all playing football together. Seven games minus a penalty shoot-out, as one must now say. The height of the fall is the tragic thing about this final: Ironically, the so far sovereign Southgate sabotaged the 55-year-old dream of his country – simply because he briefly left the group. Because he – presumably with the best of intentions – made decisions that run counter to the psychological laws of nature in this sport.
Trainers need to grasp the depth psychology of their sport to be successful
The last minutes of this finale are worth being shown in future in all coaching courses around the world, because they negotiate an underestimated sub-discipline of coaching. This discipline is not about whether a coach changes the system seven times per game, it is not about training control or rousing motivational speeches. It’s about understanding the game – not from an academic perspective, but with all your senses. Each game has its own colors and smells, it contains secret symbols and follows invisible switches: if you take a wrong turn, you won’t come back.
Coach Southgate has sinned against the psychology of the game, for a few moments only, but when it’s the crucial moments, the game has no mercy. Substituting players only for the penalty shoot-out is generally not a good idea because it puts pressure on players without a rhythm – but doing so with young players, for whom one has so far hardly been used in the tournament, is a serious case of failure to provide assistance. And all that at Wembley, before the eyes of the world and with knowledge of the sport-historical dimension: this story was simply too big.
It is a realization of this EM that coaches have to grasp the depth psychology of their sport in order to be successful. Jogi Löw also repeatedly revealed perceptual difficulties of this kind – most recently when he substituted Kai Havertz for Hungary immediately after his goal and Jamal Musiala came on much too late against England. Also the orders of the Danish coach Kasper Hjulmand in the semifinals against England were directed against the meaning of the game; With the replacement of strikers Mikkel Damsgaard and Kasper Dolberg, he broke the waves that his team could have carried without need.
It will now be exciting to see if something broke between Southgate and his team or if they lost theirs Finale at home can make use of the same way that Bayern Munich lost on penalties in 2012. The following year Bayern won the Champions League – defiance is also part of the psychology of the game.
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