The England manager has generally avoided clangers and corporate-speak and his sole lapse ‘owning the process’ may have been a radical rhetorical device that worked

Every England manager has had verbal idiosyncrasies and Gareth Southgate is no different. Which is to say: he is different.

The most successful performer of the Impossible Job, Sir Alf Ramsey, developed a posh accent seemingly intended to mask his modest roots but that didn’t mean he was snooty. “I suppose I’ll have to get used to being addressed as Sir,” he said in 1967 after being knighted for services to commemorative tat vendors. “But if any player gets formal with me I’ll clobber him.”

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Sir Bobby Robson had a habit of mixing up names, once, reputedly, even confusing that of his captain with his own. “I’m Bryan,” Bryan Robson is said to have replied helpfully. “You’re Bobby.” He was also charmingly prone to letting his enthusiasm run ahead of his thinking. “Look at those olive trees!” he gushed in 1996 when explaining why he enjoyed life at Barcelona after stepping down from England. “They’re 200 years old – from before the age of Christ!”

Fabio Capello declared at his unveiling as England manager in 2007 that he would be proficient in the local lingo within a month but never got to grips with it during his four-year reign and tended to convey a vibe best interpreted as “Inglese is for losers”.

Roy Hodgson, by contrast, is a celebrated polyglot with a penchant for high-brow literature. So he could express himself beautifully. “That is absolute fucking bollocks,” quoth he in response to criticism following a scruffy 1-0 win over Norway in 2014. Scribes wasted many paragraphs on less pithy ways of saying the same things about his team’s performances.

In 2016 Sam Allardyce had just finished greeting everyone when he had to say goodbye.

And so to Southgate, who since being entrusted with the national team’s destiny has communicated with refreshing clarity. Thus his speech has matched an approach in which he has defetishised the captain’s armband, removed old hang-ups and pooh-poohed pomposity.

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He has addressed other issues with similar intelligence and simplicity, whether dismissing Boris Johnson’s grandstanding – “it is of little interest to me what the foreign secretary thinks about it,” he said in March after the politician compared Russia’s hosting of the World Cup to Hitler’s staging of the 1936 Olympics – or calmly confronting media organisations with double-standards. “I’m looking at a room full of journalists and it’s not very multicultural,” he began when asked to discuss racism in English football when he was the under-21 manager.

And then this week he spoke about “owning the process” of penalty shooting. It wasn’t the first time, either. When it comes to preparing a team there are some residents of England’s HQ in St George’s Park who like to sermonise about the “golden thread” running through national teams’ DNA and “ticking the boxes on the pathway” while “sharing the journey”. But Southgate tends to be above that blather, speaking in a way that leaves no doubt what he is talking about. He doesn’t do sloganeering. “Owning the process” is his solitary lapse.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Southgate with hero Jordan Pickford after England owned the process of penalties against Colombia. Photograph: Denis Tyrin/Tass

It sound suspiciously like the managerial jargon spouted by executives who try to dress up plain ideas in metaphorical cummerbunds. Or waistcoats. As such, it seemed uncharacteristic for Southgate.

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Probably, then, he has been using it as a radical rhetorical device, a deliberate rupture from his usual speech, so jarring it reinforced the idea English players had to change their thinking about penalties. And what better way to do that than by recognising that shooting from the spot is a process, not a lottery or a doomed attempt to break a hex.

As for where Southgate picked up the term, who knows? It is already hackneyed in business parlance. Microsoft was using it as many as three years ago. And it has been deployed in other fields since long before that. Catherine Barns edited an issue of Accord magazine in 2002 entitled Owning the Process: Public Participation in Peacekeeping. That might have been handy reading as England prepared for their charm offensive in Russia. The phrase has also been commonly used in counselling, which, come to think of it, seems a good place to have started when seeking solutions to England’s penalty trauma.

Having triumphed at last on penalties, England contest a quarter-final against Sweden, a team that plays like Southgate usually speaks: clearly and coherently, sans panache but with punch. They will be hard to beat, no what matter anyone says.