Spare a thought for Lee Carsley. England’s interim head coach for the second half of 2024 is practically written out of the new four-part BBC adaptation of James Graham’s play Dear England. The only reference to his six-game tenure comes in the form of a clip of Thomas Tuchel being asked the question that Carsley struggled to answer: about whether or not he would sing the national anthem.But the upside of this Carsley erasure is that the show can portray a smooth transition from Southgate straight to Tuchel.The penultimate scene of the final episode shows Tuchel moving directly into Southgate’s office at St George’s Park. Southgate asks Tuchel whether he will represent “continuity or change” from his own tenure. And Tuchel — with apologies for the spoiler — tells Southgate what a brilliant job he did. “You made the unsurvivable survivable, Gareth. The impossible job possible again,” Tuchel says, before admitting he may not say that in public.If imagined conversations involving Southgate are not your thing, then you may want to give Dear England a miss. (In one flashback to the aftermath of the Euro 96 semi-final, he even bumps into John Major in a Wembley Stadium corridor.) But that handover scene does make an important point about this summer: this first tournament of the post-Southgate era still takes place under his waistcoat-shaped shadow.King Charles III (right) and Sir Gareth Southgate attend a Youth Opportunity Summit at Buckingham Palace last week (Andrew Matthews – WPA Pool/Getty Images)Do you remember the last major tournament England went to without Southgate in charge? That was Euro 2016, 10 years ago. It was the tournament of Wayne Rooney in midfield, Harry Kane on corners, getting knocked out by Iceland, and Roy Hodgson’s reluctant resignation press conference the next day. The England men’s team were nothing short of a global joke.There is no point rehashing here the journey that Southgate took the England team on. But it was only because of that work, because of what Southgate built, that the FA was able to aim for the stars after he resigned. They wanted Pep Guardiola, but ended up with another world-class manager in Tuchel, who signed to take over in October 2024. And it was only because of Southgate’s work that it was remotely plausible for Tuchel to tell his players — as he did in a clip recently released by the FA — that he was aiming to put a “second star” on their shirt.The England team this summer will not look too different from a Southgate side. It will be built around a spine of Jordan Pickford, John Stones and Harry Kane, just like the sides Southgate took to the previous two World Cups in Russia and Qatar. Declan Rice will be at the heart of midfield, just as he always was for Southgate, as soon as the former Republic of Ireland international declared his football allegiance to England in 2019. There may well only be two starters for England against Croatia in Dallas next Wednesday — Nico O’Reilly and Elliot Anderson — who did not feature under Southgate.