Gareth Southgate

In football it is.

Well, yeah, yeah.

But I think the more you build up the percentages in your favour, then logically to me, you've got a better chance of succeeding.

Yeah, I mean, they are big calls.

So you're very conscious of that whilst...

I talk a lot about people and managing people and people that think I'm empathetic and hugging everybody and there's decisions that have to be made and you've got to make big calls and Wayne's one of our greatest ever players.

Now I have to say he could have made that incredibly difficult because we know that one of the hardest things for an athlete is to accept they're on the decline.

One of the reasons they are as good as they are is because they've got unbelievable self-belief.

They won't want to admit that they're coming towards the end.

In the second game I had...

He'd started the first game.

I said, look, I'm not going to start you in the second.

But for a top player, his humility and his awareness was incredible, really, because he said, no, look, I'm not getting into Manchester United's team.

I don't expect, therefore, just to start for England.

So play that out a few months down the line and he's heading towards the end at United and there were players that were playing better than him.

Now all I could do then is show as much respect as possible for the career he'd had.

I played with him on his debut so I wanted to be as respectful of what he'd achieved and go and see him and talk it through.

But the reality of that is the way he received that information made that much more comfortable for me because that could have gone anywhere, that conversation.

We've seen those things happen.

So his humility, his acceptance, and we all have a choice in those moments, don't we?