Tongue-tied Carsley is no televangelist, he's a coach

In his self-contradictions, slips and repetitions - dealing with the discomfort of bright lights and question after question - he is the most relatable England manager

- Jonathan Liew

Winston Churchill was not a socialist. You know this. I know this. And yet here I am, 18 years of age, inexplicably using my lips and my vocal cords to formulate, in the presence of two Cambridge University history professors who most definitely know that Churchill was not a socialist, the phrase "... and Churchill, in a very real way, was himself a socialist."

This is an entirely new sentence; an entirely new thought that I have never in my life entertained or elucidated, and which I hear for the first time as it leaves my mouth. Indeed it's conceivable that nobody in the span of human existence has ever expressed this exact idea in these exact terms. Because Winston Churchill - and two decades on, I really can't be clear enough on this point - was not a socialist.

On this basis, and possibly others, I was invited to pursue my history studies at an alternative establishment. And, you have to say, fair enough. Worked out fine all round. Over the years I've recounted this story to people, and invariably they ask: why didn't you correct yourself? Why didn't you say you misspoke?

But of course the brain that is capable of making that sort of error is not remotely a brain capable of fixing it in real time. Psychologists explain these moments in existential terms: the mind has essentially retrenched into pure survival mode, overwhelmed by stress and fear and threat. Prose I can do. This is the good stuff. Wins awards year on year. But speaking well, crafting a message, projecting assurance: this is a gift, an entirely separate skill. I've never had it. All of which is a circuitous and intensely self-triggering way of explaining that I know exactly how Lee Carsley feels.