Gareth Southgate should forget about Manchester United. He’s better off staying with England, here’s why…

England will be the team to beat at the European Championships this summer and if I was giving advice to Gareth Southgate amid rumors making him the next manager of Manchester United, I’d say sit tight instead.

This England team has at least two more tournaments in them – depending on their age – and Gareth should stick around and enjoy the fruits of it.

He enjoyed a huge stroke of luck in how he landed the job following Sam Allardyce’s departure and has benefited from the very timely development of this highly talented English group.

As he knows well from his time with Middlesbrough, managing a club with its day-to-day demands is a completely different job.

Gareth is non-confrontational; he has a safe image so that will appeal to some. But look at the three most successful managers in the Premier League: Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and Mikel Arteta, they are all very emotional, passionate characters who wear their hearts on their sleeves. It’s not Gareth. Of course, there’s more than one way to get a job done, but the United job, if it comes up, needs a big character.

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Bigger, more experienced managers such as Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho have had a decent crack at it, but ultimately failed, while little has improved under the very different approach of Ole Gunnar Solskjær and Erik ten Hag.

As I’ve said before, whoever takes that job needs to get the right recruitment first. Find top players and they don’t have to tell you twice, they do the job for you. I was part of such a dressing room as a player with Liverpool and I had that as manager at Rangers.

Of course there is a link between Dan Ashworth coming in as technical director at United and Gareth, but is that enough? No, if England win the EC, his best bet is to stay.

Gareth has been given a chance to look at another pair of good prospects against Brazil on Saturday night in Jarrad Branthwaite and Kobbie Mainoo.

Should they start or come on, I would expect them to do well, firstly because they are both talented young footballers and secondly, it’s a friendly and I don’t put anything in friendlies.

At Liverpool, the management openly encouraged us to miss these types of games. I got 54 caps for Scotland and would have won a lot more but missed the opportunity to play in meaningless friendlies. It stayed with me as a manager that if you ever went to see a player in a game like that, it was usually a waste of time. The players weren’t really into it and you learned very little.

There is fuss about preparing for an international debut and it is generally true that the higher you go in football your thought process has to be quicker, your touch has to be better and you should never give the ball away cheaply, but in a friendly match. the process is always one yard behind.

I actually made my international debut in a friendly against East Germany in 1974. It was special to pull on the Scotland shirt, but the first game didn’t worry me too much. My goal was just to win it, I wasn’t nervous. We knew very little about East Germany and I was blessed with confidence so it wasn’t something I was too concerned about.

Similarly, Brazil should not fear for Branthwaite and Mainoo. They are both really good footballers, athletic and able to take the ball in tight spaces. They are prepared to choose a passport instead of those who are happy to take charge.

To emphasize my point, when you’re in the tunnel waiting to go out, there are two types of players: the footballer who hopes to get through 90 minutes without making a mistake, and the real footballer who says: ‘I can don’t wait to get out there and be the difference today’. Branthwaite and Mainoo are the latter. They both have a bright future for Gareth Southgate to count on.

Being punished by Zico for a burger at 02:00!

There were two players I could never get close to in my career, one was England’s World Cup winner Alan Ball, the other was Zico, the great Brazilian.

Playing for Scotland, I had what you might call the misfortune of facing the Brazil side in 1982, probably the best side not to win a World Cup.

It was 84 degrees in Seville, it was an evening kick off, but the sun was still out. We had gone out for our warm-up and came back covered in sweat. We went back into the locker rooms to cool off and then came out for kick off and the anthems.

Standing next to the referee, I look down the line at our team and see various bodies, some extremely white, some with red hair, and each drenched in sweat. We looked like we had just finished the game.

I turned the other way towards Socrates, Brazil’s captain, and saw a line of tanned, flawless individuals who looked as if they had just stepped out of a Marks and Spencer shop window… not a bead of sweat on any of them. I knew we were going to have a tough night.

David Narey then made the mistake of scoring first which upset them and they beat us 4-1. I played against some really great Brazilians that day and one of them was Zico, who scored their first goal and pulled the strings.

I had previous experience with him months earlier when he was man of the match for his club Flamengo against Liverpool in what was known as the Intercontinental Cup.

It wasn’t taken as seriously as it is now, or certainly not by us then.

We had an extremely busy 16-hour flight to Tokyo via Anchorage, Alaska, so when we arrived we weren’t in the best of nicks.

The night before the game I share a room with Kenny Dalglish as usual, as I wake up at 2 and starving. Kenny felt the same way, so we order a burger and chips, funny enough we can’t sleep. I look out the window and see really bright lights which, on closer inspection, are a driving range. Kenny loves his golf so he needed some encouragement. We’re walking across and getting ready to hit a few balls when the next minute we hear a few boisterous English voices. It was the rest of the team. They couldn’t sleep either and took a few beers with them. It was all very entertaining but it didn’t serve us too well later in the afternoon as Zico and Co ran out 3-0 winners.

Klopp’s blast shows the demands on top managers

That trigger moment hit Jurgen Klopp last weekend, and he gave a Danish journalist his five days of fame.

I’ve been there as a manager too many times to mention when that one question pushes the wrong button inside you and you say something you regret.

It’s part of the game, reporters asking you questions to get a reaction and make headlines while you struggle with emotions – it’s set up perfectly for them.

It can just be the way something is worded that sets you off and Jurgen would have been filled with frustration at how his Liverpool side let Manchester United, their fiercest rivals, off the hook in a hugely important FA Cup tie . It would all have been very raw when asked about his side’s lack of intensity.

What you didn’t see immediately after his blast is that Jurgen then did a perfectly calm TV interview with Nedum Onuoha and was magnanimous enough to congratulate United’s Amad Diallo on his winning goal.

There are huge demands on top managers to deliver interview after interview after a game, sometimes up to as many as 10. That’s the price of the ticket. But all the noise surrounding the incident is a mountain out of a mole hill.

Jurgen is a very emotional man, it’s part of his make-up. It’s a big reason he’s loved so much, and a big reason he’ll be missed when he leaves this summer.