Gareth Southgate has always been a man interested in life outside the football circus. When he played for England, I remember chatting to him at the carousel at Fiumicino airport before a vital France 1998 qualifier in Rome. As he waited for his bag (there’s always baggage with England), Southgate reflected on what he would see on this visit to the Eternal City. Sistine Chapel? Colosseum? La Dolce Vita? No chance. His itinerary was airport, hotel, training ground, hotel, stadium, airport; basically the External City. Southgate accepted his professional lot and looked forward to the day he could return and explore.

He certainly made up for it when he moved to punditry. Covering England and Champions League matches with ITV, Southgate organised outings to see Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ before an AC Milan game, to the Prado before a Real Madrid match and to the Warsaw Rising museum when giving expert, occasionally critical, analysis of England at Euro 2012 in Poland. As manager, Southgate is a prisoner to the schedule. Every ounce of energy and second of time is dedicated to reaching Berlin for the final on 14 July. So he cannot see the extraordinary world around him. Only 500 yards from England’s training pitch is an exquisite 900-year-old church. Ten miles away in Weimar is one of the few remaining Bauhaus buildings. A few miles west of that lies Buchenwald concentration camp. If anything puts the strains and squabbles of a sports event into perspective, a visit here does.

The English are quite a sight at tournaments. In a Frankfurt hotel before the Denmark game, I saw a waistcoated Southgate lookalike, as friendly as the real one, pretending to lay out his tactics on a pool table and being approached by two young women in England crop tops who turned out to be OnlyFans ‘models’. They presented him with flowers and sweets and he smiled for their TikTok routine. Staring through the window at this 21st-century tableau was an England fan blowing up an inflatable RAF bomber to brandish at German stewards.

Heading into Bauhaus land, I had flashbacks to childhood days as the son of a modernist architect. Dad had a couple of Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chairs which kept disappearing for film-shoots, leaving me having to watch The Big Match sitting on the floor. At least the chairs were put to good use on set: Taylor and Burton made out on them in The V.I.P.s.

One of my favourite parts of tournaments is sitting on Zoom talking to BBC local radio stations about England’s triumphs and (usually) travails; 15 stations in two hours is my record. Waiting to go on air, you get a snapshot of British life – the keen interest in weather, roadworks and Phil Collins. The BBC’s push towards centralisation seems mad and sad to me, a step towards the homogenisation of our wonderfully differing counties.

Talking of radio, and the odd occasion when I get invited on the august Today programme – my dream is to be there the same day as my revered academic brother Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad (Tim to me), now ranked the 45th most influential Muslim in the world (still behind Liverpool’s Mo Salah). Today is far too organised but I’d love it if they mixed us up and I had to blag Thought for the Day (‘Southgate – take the bloody handbrake off’) and Tim to evaluate the importance of Luke Shaw’s hamstring to England’s chances in Euro 2024. Tim’s so eloquent he could probably do it.

You’ve probably read all the dispatches about how not everything works in Germany. The railway children would be adults by the time some of the trains here arrive at their destination. Delays, missed stops, wrong platforms, cancellations. Germans just shrug. They’re used to it. It’s a wonderful place, and the people have been engaging hosts, but the infrastructure is creaking. I gave a talk in a Munich restaurant and the microphone went off because someone turned the espresso machine on.

Due to EU working-time rules having to be observed in Germany, some of the reporters covering England can’t attend the team’s actual matches because they’d exceed their permitted
60 hours a week. That easily gets eaten up covering training and media conferences.

I did my best to lift England spirits before they left to face Slovenia by losing heavily to Harry Kane at darts. Judging by Tuesday night’s performance, it didn’t work.