Neither Phil Foden, Jadon Sancho or Mason Mount had even been born when Southgate missed his kick, while Jack Grealish was nine months old.

So the idea that preordained mishap tends to be the grand narrative of England at major finals probably hasn’t intruded into their worlds. Four of the most compelling young talents in European football, they exert a genuine fascination now as Southgate faces the challenge of unlocking doors for the formidable Harry Kane.

But England in a finals tournament always feels slightly less about football than about the human condition.

They evolve before our eyes into a sociology study, one narrated chiefly by a neurotic, routinely overheating media. It almost becomes the simultaneous triumph and failure of celebrity culture.

Southgate comes across as an erudite, empathetic man who won’t be cowed by the staged fury certain to come his way if this team underachieves over the coming month. But the blast and radiation of England failure has scarred many good men in the past.

He must, he knows, strike a balance between synthesising these once-in-a-generation talents into a sharp-edged, attacking union while avoiding the kind of trap that befell Sven-Goran Eriksson, when trying to accommodate Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and David Beckham in a midfield that had plenty of stardust but little coherence.

Sven ended up using Beckham in a somewhat convoluted ‘quarterback’ role at the ’06 World Cup so that Lampard and Gerrard, ranked numbers two and three in a poll by the influential France Football magazine for European Footballer of the Year the year before, could play together.

But a team picked on populist lines never looked especially convincing.

This being, effectively, a home tournament, Southgate is immediately under pressure, England playing three Wembley games in nine days, all of which will come freighted with wild expectation and the always reliable English malady of brittle nerves.

To that end, there is already speculation that he may baulk at the idea of unleashing too many tyros all at once, when more stable options like Raheem Sterling and Marcus Rashford are available.

The one thing we do know about England is that this will not be a story told quietly.

Ever since the late Bobby Robson guided them to that ’90 World Cup semi-final, there’s been a sense of the national psyche existing on a perpetual knife-edge.

The vicious tabloid lampooning of Graham Taylor gave way to a respectable home Euros performance under Terry Venables in ’96 before the scandal-hit south-Londoner was replaced by a devout, and occasionally unhinged, Christian, in Glenn Hoddle.

This was the era of the faith healer (Eileen Drewery), the injecting French medic (Dr Rougier) and that slightly kooky environment in which backroom staff were advised the night of England’s ’98 World Cup defeat to Argentina to walk around the pitch only in an anti-clockwise direction, so that they might create positive energy for the team.

Such energy, sadly, eluded them, David Batty having the misfortune to be that night’s fall guy in another shoot-out defeat. Batty admitted afterwards that his missed kick was the first penalty he’d taken in his professional life.

That was, of course, also the night of David Beckham’s flicked boot at Diego Simeone, an act for which he would be so soundly vilified at home that – months later – someone erected a billboard outside a Nottingham church, proclaiming “God forgives even David Beckham”.

After Hoddle came Kevin Keegan, a 20-month reign ending miserably with the manager’s resignation immediately after defeat to Germany in their opening qualifier for the ’02 World Cup at Wembley, a game for which Southgate’s selection in central midfield was broadly pilloried.

Then came Eriksson, dull, bespectacled and mysteriously flirtatious to the female eye, England’s fourth manager in four years and their first ‘foreign’ appointment. It was a choice met witheringly at The Sun, where the Swede’s arrival was interpreted as “a humiliation”, “an admission of decline”, “a terrible, pathetic, self-inflicted indictment” and “an awful mess”.

Seven months later, Michael Owen scored a hat-trick as England beat Germany 5-1 in Munich.

Under Sven, England’s so-called ‘Golden Generation’ would make three quarter-finals, but this was the era of celebrity wives too, of OK! and Hello magazine attention overload – and the sense of celebrity too often supplanting any hard, professional focus.

And England’s story back then was all but written through the prism of Wayne Rooney’s rising martyrdom, the Liverpudlian suffering a broken foot at Euro ’04, then being sent off at the World Cup two years later for retaliating against a heavy challenge from Portugal’s Ricardo Carvalho.

This was, of course, the night of Ronaldo’s incendiary wink.

Steve McClaren then lasted just a year and a half and was maybe best known for an umbrella before Fabio Capello – a traditional Italian Catholic with a steely indifference towards anything the tabloids might write about him – took over.

Capello seemed to understand much of what undermined England at major tournaments, the corrosive celebrity, the preoccupation with media, the tendency to live up to a stereotype of institutional panic and tactical sterility.

He wanted England to covet possession, to play with structure, discipline and the hard, even cynical edge so often seen in his own country’s national team.

To some degree, maybe he misread the room here.

Because his ways were deemed joyless, militaristic, old-world almost – his adherence to 4-4-2 at a time other European coaches were proving daring and innovative meant that, in time, England’s 2010 World Cup training camp at Bloemfontein came to be depicted as some kind of football Alcatraz.

The mood of supporters and players was summed up after the 0-0 draw with Algeria when Rooney – as jeers rained down from the stands – looked into the camera and said: “Nice to see your own fans booing you. If that’s what loyal support is, for f**k’s sake!’

There was no penalty shoot-out heartbreak that year, just the most persuasive argument given anywhere for the introduction of goal-line technology after a perfectly good Lampard goal was disallowed at a time when their round-of-16 tie with Germany was still very much alive in a game that was eventually lost 4-1.

Capello stayed on for the subsequent Euro qualifiers, England staying unbeaten in all eight games only for the Italian to resign after the FA’s removal of the captaincy from John Terry for, well, a private life that was – at the time – generating more newsprint than Fleet Street.

What followed was four soporific years of the eminently competent, but monumentally uninspiring, Roy Hodgson before that bizarre 67-day reign of Sam Allardyce, which was ended by a tabloid sting.

And so it’s to Southgate that England now turns to in search of their first silverware since ’66.

He originally picked four right-backs, it seems, to sidestep the charge of philistinism certain to come his way had he left Trent Alexander-Arnold out of his final 26, only to see the 22-year-old taken out of the tournament through injury.

And he has gambled on two of the squad’s natural leaders, Harry Maguire and Jordan Henderson, overcoming injury in time to be serious influences on this tournament.

But there is a sense of potentially thrilling substance to England this time. Of a team that could be more than just functional or efficient. Of one that could be beautiful.

Much depends on the manager’s nerve from here; on Southgate’s England proving an inversion of old stereotype.

Failure will, he knows, leave them central characters in a soap opera.