GARETH SOUTHGATE was given "a good working over" in his interview to become England manager, according to Football Association chief executive Martin Glenn.
Southgate was the only candidate the organisation spoke to and an existing member of FA staff but Glenn insists the three-hour meeting, which took place at St George's Park last Monday, was no formality.
Glenn joined FA chairman Greg Clarke, technical director Dan Ashworth, League Managers' Association chairman Howard Wilkinson and former England left-back Graeme Le Saux in grilling the former Middlesbrough boss.
"We got a couple more people in, in Howard Wilkinson and Graeme Le Saux, to really sit down with a five-man panel to really give Gareth a good working over," he told FATV.
"He did a review of the four games (of his interim reign) and he took a lot of quite difficult questions of how he set-up, how he anticipated things. He was interviewed quite strongly and coming out of that you get two things.
"You get great confidence that he really knows what he's talking about and really understands how to motivate players in an international set-up.
"Second you can also see that, like all of us, he's also got things to learn and we've got a better idea of ways we can put support around him so he can be successful."
Glenn had suggested earlier in the process that Southgate would not be a solitary candidate and although no other individuals were approached on this occasion, he says other claims were considered.
Having gone through a wider-ranging recruitment when Sam Allardyce was installed in July, the FA had an idea of potential alternatives and used them as yardsticks to measure Southgate against.
"Over the summer we contacted and interviewed a number of managers so we'd got a pretty recent database of who was out there," he said.
"The job was really to assess Gareth against that group of people we'd looked at before."
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