Gareth Southgate is not the one - but he has changed English football

FROM THE OLYMPIASTADION, BERLIN: You felt that this time it might be different. But then again, you always do. It's England.

England fell to defeat in a second consecutive European Championship final at Berlin's Olympiastadion to the competition's strongest, and unquestionably best, team of players. Spain have become the first team to win all seven of their matches at this tournament. There can be no arguments.

Gareth Southgate is left to wonder what could've been again. Three years ago, defeat came through missed penalties on home turf but the hallmarks of the same failings as that night at Wembley were seen here. England, falling to a team who knew better how to control games of football. The salt in the wound was seeing Giorgio Chiellini, red-hot heel of Euro 2020 for pulling Bukayo Saka's collar, bring the trophy out on to the stage for Spain to collect.

It was Chiellini's Italy who bettered England three years ago and his former teammate Alvaro Morata's Spain did the same in Berlin. England reached the final through a different path, one dependent on moments, spirit, hanging in there and delivering through individual brilliance rather than anything else.

Cole Palmer even managed to provide that moment on Sunday night. But it came too early.

England and Southgate's habit of submitting and handing over control to better technical teams with underpinned identities cost them again. England found their way back into the match after falling behind shortly after half-time but reverted to type and got punched late on. They took a blow that they didn't have enough time to recover from.

Harry Symeou and Scott Saunders react to England losing the Euro 2024 final, from Berlin. Click the link to watch & subscribe to the 90min YouTube channel.

Southgate says now is not the time to make a decision on his future as manager, but this now feels a perfect time for those outside to view this as a project with its course run.

But that's okay. Southgate may have failed to end those (now 58 advancing to 60) years of hurt but where he's taken England from and to is a story worth respecting and remembering.

He's been in the England senior job for approaching eight years, 11 within the national set up on the whole. He succeeded Stuart Pearce as manager of the under-21 team in August 2013 and played a key role in changing the face of English football long before he took the senior job.

And when you consider what he came into when he got the big job was a team who'd lost to 300,000-populated Iceland at Euro 2016 and the shortest reign of any England manager in history just before him, they've come a heck of a long way.

There was even the pints of wine talk. Remember that England?

Southgate has done an incredible job of bringing English football together. Building confidence for fans and players. Breaking mental barriers like those penalty shootout demons that always haunt them. There's a strength of mentality in this team now that didn't exist before. There is a generation of players who will have plenty more cracks at breaking the duck and one day they'll do it. You've no doubt.

It just wasn't to be this time, again. And perhaps it's the right time for Southgate to step aside and let the next person take this team on, to try and develop a habit of playing some commanding football like their last two final opponents have managed to go alongside the mountain of good things Gareth Southgate has brought to modern England.

The timing is raw and the reaction will be fierce. But England are on a journey that's yet to reach its end. Southgate has more than played his part in the evolution, even if it is his time to move on.

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