England interim manager Gareth Southgate has declared ahead of the week which will probably dictate whether he is given the job permanently that it is certainly not “impossible” – and that he sees high pressure management as the environment that matters.

The 46-year-old has steadfastly refused to state whether he wants the job for keeps though his discussion ahead of Friday’s World Cup qualifier against Scotland at Wembley made it clear he would. “You want to be involved in huge matches in big competitions,” he said, in another impressive and articulate performance in the spotlight which the position has brought.

“As an England coach there are not huge opportunities to do that. It depends how seriously I want to take myself. I accept the landscape. If we play well and we win then things will be positive. If we don't there will be criticism, but that's part of being involved in top level sport and in matches that matter. If you are at a big club or with your country then that's the landscape you are in. If you don't want to be involved in big games then don't be

“I don't think any job is impossible. I think certain jobs are more complex than others, but no job is impossible otherwise we would not have put a man on the moon. There are huge breakthroughs in industry and computing that some would have thought unimaginable so in my mind no job is impossible.”

Southgate navigated his way through several controversies on Monday – defending the freedom of the individual player to wear a poppy in the face of Fifa’s instruction England players must not; then offering a robust defence of Luke Shaw’s work ethic in the face of Manchester United Jose Mourinho’s attack on him for withdrawing from Sunday’s squad at Swansea.

Southgate suggested last week at a session with University of Derby’s Football Journalism degree course that he is undecided about taking the England job permanently, stating the effect on his family may be a consideration. He made it clear on Monday that he felt those observations were intended to be “private” – though a journalism school is hardly the place to go to disclose details which are not to be published.

Southgate said that his family were “a pretty resilient bunch” and that a career decision could not be based entirely on such a consideration – “otherwise nothing would ever get done, we would never move house, the kids leave their toys behind and everything else.”



He saw the risk attached to discussing Mourinho’s attack on Shaw and Chris Smalling, who has been out with a sore foot. Asked if he had sympathy with the full-back, he said: “Would that be a suggestion Jose hasn’t, if I say that?”

But he did not hold back from saying that he did feel Shaw was suffering “on-going difficulties” relating to his horrific leg break of 14 months ago and that there was a psychological duty of care in helping a player come back from that. Shaw is understood to be suffering persistent pain in the back of the leg he broke against PSV Eindhoven in September last year.

“With any injury, any recovery, there’s physical and psychological aspects to that, whether that’s an injury of a week or months,” he said. “That is definitely part of the process of getting a player back into playing. Maybe that at times is to be aggressive and maybe that at times is to be supportive. There can be different approaches towards that because sometimes you might need a nudge to say, ‘Come on, you can.’”

It was not at all his “impression” that Smalling or Shaw was psychologically weak, he said. “Luke’s had a really tough injury. Very often it’s easy to look from the outside or make judgements on people without knowing them really, really well. All players have insecurities, all of them. All players have anxiety, and confidence issues at different times. I don’t care who they are, even the best in the world. All sportsmen, even Andy Murray, everybody has performance anxieties of some sort. How you then control that and are able to deal with that is probably the key to you being successful.”

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Of the poppy, Southgate said: “It's part of the history and tradition of what we are as a nation, the remembrance. The fact we have the freedom of speech to make statements as we see fit, we owe it to the people that gave their lives in the two world wars in particular.”