At moments like this, it can be the books the managers choose to read which reveal the most.
Before one of the tournaments he led the England men's team into, Roy Hodgson was reading Stoner, the 1960s novel by American John Williams about an unsensational, conservative academic who is patient, earnest, enduring and steadfast in equal measure. Hodgson, in so many ways.
Sarina Wiegman doesn't read novels – only non-fiction works - and that adds up. She seems so fixed on the here and now, the precise tactical and interpersonal dynamics of the team, the challenge, all the conceivable whys and wherefores of the next 90 minutes, that you imagine it does not leave much time to escape into another world before switching off the light.