The fire Southgate lit and the German who might finish the job

England have reached the stage where people who remember 1966 feel less like football fans and more like surviving witnesses to a vanished civilisation.

I met one today. Trevor. Old enough to remember Geoff Hurst's hat-trick. He recalled watching the final at his uncle's house while his dad drank Carling Black Label and shouted at the television. Apparently he also got clipped round the ear for talking during extra time. History survives in fragments.

Soon enough the BBC will be producing reverent feature packages about these men. Grainy archive footage. Soft piano music. "I remember where I was when England won the World Cup." Not quite the Normandy landings, but English football has always had a flair for treating one summer afternoon as sacred national folklore.

That is partly because nothing since has quite matched it.

Under Gareth Southgate, England came closer than they had any right to expect after years of dysfunction and tabloid psychodrama. Semi-final in 2018. Final in 2021. Another final in 2024. England stopped being an international punchline and became, if not champions, then at least serious.

More importantly, they became oddly likeable.

The endless club rivalries softened. The circus noise quietened. Players who once looked burdened by the shirt began to appear almost comfortable in it. Southgate understood something previous England managers never really grasped: international football is as much emotional management as tactical management.

The football itself, admittedly, could resemble a hostage negotiation.

England often played as though creativity were something faintly embarrassing. Their most memorable attacking routine involved a line of players shuffling around the penalty area like overexcited wedding guests before Harry Maguire launched himself at a set piece with glorious agricultural force. Nobody was confusing it with Brazil in 1970.

And yet those tournaments carried something England had lacked for years: momentum. A creeping sense that maybe the story could change. Even the permanently furious bloke at the pub briefly allowed himself the possibility of joy.

Then came the familiar ending. Narrow defeat. Penalties. The slow trudge back into ordinary life.

Players disappeared into chauffeured club football and supporters returned to alarm clocks, rail delays and jobs they tolerated rather than loved. England lost again, but under Southgate the defeats felt different. Less like humiliation. More like yearning.

That ultimately became the problem.

Success alters expectation. England no longer wanted respectability. They wanted trophies. Southgate had rebuilt the house, but by the end people were staring at the wallpaper and complaining about the finish.

So now comes Thomas Tuchel.

A German England manager still feels faintly surreal, largely because English football culture remains a few decades behind modern reality. The old chants linger on. So do the inherited resentments. Somewhere, probably already several pints deep, someone is still singing about German bombers over Wembley.

Yet the appointment also makes perfect sense.

Southgate gave England emotional intelligence. Tuchel arrives with something different: tactical ruthlessness. His career has been built on solving elite-level football problems under pressure. Champions League winner. League titles. A coach capable of standing opposite Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp and finding a way to disrupt them.

Perhaps that has been England's missing piece all along.

There is an irony to this, of course. The man who restored dignity to the national team ultimately walked away because the country could not contain its own appetite for more. Now the coach asked to finish the job comes from the nation English football spent half a century defining itself against.

If football really is coming home, it may require a German to open the door.

And Trevor? He will still be there, pint in hand, waiting for another summer that feels like 1966. The beer has changed since then. The longing has not.

For the first time in a while, though, the waiting feels faintly plausible rather than entirely hopeless.