IT WAS a badly kept secret. The kind of secret where you hope it doesn’t leak but within minutes, people are telling you the secret which you started.

Gareth Southgate was always going to be named England manager after Sam Allardyce was relieved of his duties.

The four games he was in charge for as interim manager weren’t trick games, the Scotland tie at Wembley was a potential hiccup but Gordon Strachan didn’t really pose a threat to England.

Those four games were largely seen as an audition and it was quite a farce that despite there being no other candidates interviewed, Southgate had to wait to be announced as manager.

It was like those in charge of hiring were waiting for someone else to appear and provide competition. But everyone knew who was getting the job.

I have no problem with Southgate being in charge of the national team as I generally have no interest in international football.

It comes around once every few months, at the worst possible time, and then every two years there is a big tournament which fails to live up to the hype.

You could also apply that to England. They constantly fail to live up to the expectations of the fans and the media and Southgate’s appointment is living proof that expectations are at an all-time low.

But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Like I have said before, England need to stop pretending they are lobsters and accept that they are sardines.

Southgate can be a successful appointment if his targets are realistic. Everyone knows that England will qualify for the next World Cup in 2018.

It’s what they do there, that is what everyone will judge how good an appointment Southgate is. Forget talk of quarter-finals and potentially winning the tournament.

Focus on taking a fully-fit, in-form side and work towards getting out of the group stage. Start there. Start with trying to win a game, something they didn’t do at the 2014 Brazil World Cup.

It may sound silly but England need to learn to walk again. They need to start from scratch and use this appointment as ground zero.

Southgate is the “safe” appointment. Gone are the “sexy” appointments like Fabio Capello and Sven-Goran Eriksson.

Even the managers linked to the job are no longer “glamorous.” There was a time where the English Football Association were trying to entice Phil Scolari and the best coaches in the world.

Now they are settling for average managers who have never really tasted success at club level.

This appointment seems like a scraping of the barrel for England and should this go wrong, the bigwigs at Wembley will hope that Eddie Howe wants to take over or another candidate emerges.

Because if in two to four years time, the FA are still interviewing Steve Bruce and begging Arsene Wenger to do them a favour, then serious questions need to be raised about the long-term thinking surrounding the national team.

No-one knows which players will be in form come Russia 2018 or what managers will be in fashion next week, let alone next year.

But there has to be a contingency list in place from now, in case Southgate crashes and burns as manager.

Whether you have a promising candidate come in as assistant to the former Middlesbrough manager or manage the Under-21s and have him follow a similar route that Southgate took, the FA need to be preparing the next England manager.

There’s already talk of Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard having some kind of role as part of Southgate’s backroom staff. If there is a valid point to either one of them helping out, then great.

If not, don’t hire them. We saw with David Beckham helping out Stuart Pearce at the London 2012 Olympics that it was a complete waste of time and having Lampard and Gerrard play similar roles would be counterproductive.

If the plan is to have them develop in the system and one day become England manager, then have them manage the national youth teams.

Have them work with the future of the national team and report to Southgate. Have the trio in constant communication, discussing how the teams should be playing so that when players are called up to the senior squad, the transition is seamless.

It’s how Spain and Germany are able to keep slotting youngsters into their system. They are trained to play the exact same way throughout the age groups and it becomes natural.

How often do you see English youngsters fail to adapt to playing senior football for the national side because they were played in a 4-4-2 at one age group and then all of a sudden asked to play in a 4-2-3-1.

There is no continuity throughout the England national team set-up. Having previously managed the U21 side, Southgate must know this and must fix it.

He should have some say in who replaces him. Someone he is comfortable working with, who has a similar football philosophy to him and can implement his ideas. Not the FA’s.

Southgate may have to answer to the FA but the youth managers must answer to the senior team manager because they are producing players for him to use.

The senior team manager must be able to pluck a player from any age group, drop them into the senior side and expect him to know what his responsibilities and duties are.

It’s what the more successful national and international sides are able to do. You look at Liverpool’s victory over Leeds in the League Cup last week.

Those youngsters who played looked like seasoned veterans in Jurgen Klopp’s system, despite making their debuts. That’s because there is a clear plan at the Anfield club and everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.

If England could sort out a system where once an England manager moves on, the person below him steps up, there could be huge benefits.

It eliminates these long, arduous interview processes which sees the same candidates apply for the job. Senior manager is sacked? Fine, replace him with the U21 manager who is playing the same style of football and knows the players.

The new U21 manager would be the U19 manager and so on and so forth. The players will have worked with the coaches and managers and everyone will know how to get the best out of each other because they would have developed together.

This seems like a utopian football world imagined in my head but there is no reason why this wouldn’t work in reality. They have tried everything else, why not see if this works?

Southgate can be the man to turn England’s fortunes around but the supporters and media have to understand that him being a successful England manager does not revolve around winning a trophy. It can be winning a game. That is how far England have fallen.