Well, that was something new. On a sleepy, listless night of football-style product, Wales still managed to produce something daring and avant garde in the opening 20 minutes of this 3-0 England friendly win.
It is often said football has reached some kind of end point, that there are no new frontiers. But here Craig Bellamy’s team produced an experiment in un-defending. We are going to deconstruct this thing. Like a postmodern 1990s bangers and mash served on a gastropub house-brick, with no bangers, no mash just a spritz of gravy-absence, we are going to take it apart, to serve up a plate of non-defence. And also, in the same spirit, charge you 50 quid for the pleasure of coming.
It took less than three minutes to reach this bold new frontier. England had a corner on the left. The ball veered to the back post past an arrangement of passive red shirts, was slipped back in without resistance and side-footed into the net by Morgan Rogers, eight Wales players present but also powerfully absent.
They did it again 10 minutes later. Ollie Watkins was given time on the goalline to control the ball, juggle it, speak to his agent, consider the futility of all self-contained competitive matrices, then smash it into the net. On 20 minutes it was 3-0 as Bukayo Saka was presented with a kind of ring of steel, a personal quarantine space, invited to come inside, the way he always comes inside, and spank the ball with a beautifully tender violence into the far top corner.
At which point the game, which had never actually started, was over. To the extent it would have been understandable if Thomas Tuchel had sent out a message to go a little easy. Win. But don’t win too much. Make it look like football.
Is it good for England to play this kind of game? Wales aren’t this bad generally, even if they were this bad here. They had some attacks. The Welsh fans made a lot of noise. By the end the one real England benefit, keeping up the warm feelings of Serbia away, had been achieved, no small thing given international football is essentially all about how everyone feels.
Otherwise it was hard not to think about how this all going to play out more widely. The only really notable noise leading into this game was Tuchel’s assertion that England’s supporters need to keep their expectations at a reasonable level, that this is not self-evidently a world-beating team, something that is obviously true, but which is still somehow controversial.
In doing so Tuchel raised an interesting question, perhaps the single most important issue given the effects down the years of delusionally overheated hopes, both in terms of performance and how that performance is then perceived.
It is a question that was barely addressed in this extended act of light cardio. Beating Wales has almost zero relation to the experience of meeting Spain or France or Portugal in a knockout game. But the fact Tuchel’s comments drew snippiness, a snort of disbelief, the assumption this must be some kind of mind game, negging the lads, is a big part of the problem.
This is the England tax, the weight of that osmium-inlaid shirt. It’s the exceptionalism that gets you in the end (the greatest exceptionalism in the world, by the way). But it wasn’t hard to see what Tuchel is talking about even here.
England fielded a good, thrusting, high-class starting XI, but a team that also contained only one player, John Stones, who has won the Premier League or the Champions League. Some first-choice picks are missing. With Harry Kane absent the centre-forward, and indeed the only available candidate, was a 29-year-old with three goals his last 25 games. Watkins is an excellent, likable footballer. But on current form this doesn’t really stack up with that allegedly squandered hand of world-class talent, all bangers all the time, the golden children betrayed by the dark lord Southgate, who only got to finals.
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The reality is England do have a shot. But trust the process manager. Tuchel knows what it takes. He’s won the Champions League. He came through in that period where Germany was smelting a World Cup-winning generation. He knows what actual depth of elite talent is going to look like. What he’s saying is: you are not the frontrunners. You’ve won once in 75 years, and never outside of Wembley privileges.
Even with a full squad England’s spine is probably going to be Jordan Pickford, Marc Guéhi, Declan Rice, Kane, Saka. All very good players. But how many have won the big stuff (answer: none)? Jude Bellingham has that alpha-dog winning edge, notwithstanding the vague sense of a footballer cut from that golden generation big personality cloth. Bellingham, at least, is not an egotistical loser. He is an egotistical winner. Which seems a better thing to be.
England have rhythm now. Tuchel’s clarity, his lack of sentiment, remains arguably their best hope. They have it in them to reach a semi or a final. The treatment of Gareth Southgate for doing exactly this remains one of most telling things to have happened in England football recently. Southgate made England contenders, then was pilloried for making England contenders.
The lesson seems to be that success is arguably the worst thing that can happen as an England manager. Keep up that chat. Don’t give them hope, Thomas. They’ll never forgive you.
