Champions League conqueror is a fiery tactical zealot but narrative has always been that England need a winner
Well, at least we know now why Lee Carsley spent last week addressing the nation’s media in the style of a low-comedy adulterous 1950s sales executive explaining in flustered detail exactly why or indeed why not he might or might not be on the verge of finally leaving his wife.
The news that the Football Association has been engaged in advanced discussion with Thomas Tuchel over the vacant England head coach role does explain the riddle-me-this tone of their interim choice while discussing the immediate future.
Carsley will have known that some kind of moves were afoot at executive level, forced to obfuscate and say nothing. It was – in retrospect –an impressive piece of semantic plate-spinning. Perhaps the next time Carsley has a public platform he could turn his talents to explaining dark matter or the paradox of Trigger’s Broom (“Well, hopefully …”).
It also seems in keeping with Carsley speak that the prospect of Tuchel is an intriguing, baggage-heavy appointment that might turn out to be a not un-good idea. Tuchel for England actually makes a lot of sense.
Looking back it is understandable that initial reports of an approach last week were dismissed as agent talk, an attempt to shake out a job offer elsewhere. History suggests the FA is always the mark in the room when it comes to this stuff, the blazered muggins, job offers fluttering from its top pockets.
With Tuchel now on the verge, it seems the current executive are in fact close to an objectively impressive piece of recruitment. While objectivity has never really had much place around here, Tuchel will represent a significant departure in two obvious ways.
For starters, this would be the first time the FA has appointed a coach who has worked in England and won the European Cup. Fabio Capello had the second of these, and undertook the first with all the infectious enthusiasm of a man cleaning out a particularly noxious cat litter tray. Don Revie and Bobby Robson won European trophies. Sven-Göran Eriksson hoovered up some high-spec silverware.
But Tuchel is something more specific. This is a former Uefa men’s coach of the year, who led two clubs to the final of the Champions League in three years. Plus, of course, alongside quite a few misses, he has that obvious recent major final victory, achieved with an English team, or at least one containing three English players in the squad for the final.
If the idea is to retain the possession-centred systems-football of the England DNA years, while infusing this with some knowledge of how to actually win big games in the saddle; if being sacked for failing to appreciate Todd Boehly’s Monopoly-on-acid vision of team building can be considered in retrospect a massive tick; then Tuchel fits the job description very well.
The problem is no other job is so prone to variables and irrationality. The second obvious departure from the norm, the point that really, really, just should not be a point, is that Tuchel is German.
Eight decades ago Britain went to war with a previous iteration of Germany. And while it seems safe to say the number of people in the country who would actually see this, if pushed, as a genuine live issue is tiny, a trace element, four people in a pub who do not really mean it; it is also quite clear it will be raised as an issue, if only by that class of media commentator who appears to be still out there fighting Operation Market Garden from inside a shrubbery just outside Eindhoven.
There is serious point here. It should be a matter of genuine concern to the nation that this issue will be raised, even as a lazy twanging of some old cultural signifiers, the 1980s ITV sitcom vision of history, as though simply to be German is to carry for all eternity the war guilt of the Third Reich, Harald Schumacher’s foul on Patrick Battiston, Andreas Möller sexy-dancing on your tenderest hopes at Wembley.
Will Tuchel sing God Save the King? Probably yes, and with an amusing gusto (the eponymous King is, for what it is worth, more German than English). Will he sing Ten German bombers? And if he does not, how outraged should we feel at this further act of cultural betrayal?
The short version of this is: it does not matter. The long version: it really, really does not matter. The only tiny dandruff flakes of meaning to be gleaned here simply is further evidence of just how impossibly strange and difficult the job is in the first place.
At the end of which, only one question remains. This is the usual one. Is Tuchel going to be any good at this? From the FA’s point of view this is a genuine A-list hire and an early win. It feels ambitious, wide-screen, a gingering up of the brand. Combustible Champions League winner, tactical zealot with “authority issues”. The simple narrative of the last few years has been that all England really need is a winner. Well, now you have got one. Who would not want to watch this?
One objection is that Tuchel is in effect an external hire. The whole point, the whole interest, of international sport, is to act as a test of your system. What Tuchel expresses perfectly is the success of the German coaching school of the last 20 years. He played under Ralf Rangnick at Ulm. He coached under Rangnick, got his break at Mainz post Jürgen Klopp. What does this express about English football, other than the obvious fact that it does not produce coaches of similar stature?
The paradox here is Tuchel does express what English football has become at its top end. Which is essentially a global clearing house for the expertise of others, a magpie league, a national association where the stated DNA of the England team, its coaching basics, is based on the same possession-heavy early 2000s blueprint that Tuchel has himself adapted. One useful thing in not actually having any recognisable national style, or coaching culture. You can pretty easily fit in with what is out there. Welcome home, Thomas. We’ve been expecting you.
There will be tonal reservations, too. Tuchel is an obsessive systems manager and uber-nerd, a details coach. How will this fit the rhythms of international football? Tuchel believes in coaching as a kind of vocation. He snaps at idiotic questions, has odd rules like players looking into each other’s eyes and not using surnames. How is this going to pan out during those four months when nobody is watching and the job just involves meeting Prince William and doing a talk at a catering college?
England is also chaos, tournaments, intensity, issues. In this regard the greatest tick Tuchel could have is his first year at Chelsea, and the extraordinary feat of propelling that disconnected team to a Champions League victory, all the while running up a set of collapsing stairs. Tuchel has shown he thrives in adrenal chaos. Well, we have that.
Often overlooked, he also spoke with clarity and warmth during the difficult times of Covid and the collapse of the Chelsea ownership. For a while during the early weeks of the Russia-Ukraine war it felt like Tuchel was the only public figure speaking about what this might mean, even if he was mainly doing this while wearing a beanie hat and talking to Joe Cole and Jake Humphrey.
Tuchel was good in extremis, never more convincing than when looking wild and wired, arms revolving, eyes boggled, feeding off the chaos. Win the matches and the rest tends to fall into line. And Tuchel is as good at winning those games as anyone England are likely to get. It may not end in triumph, if only because it very rarely does. But this makes sense on most levels; outside the ones where sense is rarely found in any case.