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Hi, it's Rob Dorset here from Sky Sports News.

Welcome to a very special Christmas edition of the Essential Football Podcast.

We've got a very special guest, too, the England manager, Garys Southgate.

I sat down with Southgate at the National Football Centre at St George's Park just before Christmas

for what turned out to be a wide-ranging and exclusive interview.

There are some big headlines in what he said.

None more so than his assertion there's no job in world football that would phase him now

after spending over seven years as England manager.

And as you'll hear, he also admits that he doesn't enjoy the England victories as much as he used to.

But he says he is excited about the talent within this England squad,

which has now proved it can beat the best teams in the world.

You'll hear him say, winning the Euros next summer is eminently possible.

All of that's still to come then,

but I started by asking the England manager for his assessment of 2023,

a year in which England were unbeaten and qualified

among the top seeds for Germany, 2024.

We had definitely the toughest qualifying group in terms of rankings,

so Ukraine, Italy were the two big concerns,

but we knew North Macedonia had had big results in the past as well.

...