Thomas Tuchel has done the bare minimum expected of him when he was appointed as England manager one year ago: Qualify for the 2026 World Cup. Tuchel has done it with minimal fuss, too, as the Three Lions have won all six of their competitive games to top their qualifying group with two games to spare. It has not always been pretty, but that will count for little once the tournament gets going next summer.
Tuchel's England's team has truly begun to take shape over the course of their past three matches, as they battered Serbia 5-0, swatted Wales aside with three early goals and then destroyed Latvia to clinch their place in December's group-stage draw.
Tuchel's reign will ultimately be judged on how England fare at the World Cup and it is difficult to gauge how that is likely to go until they meet top-level opponents. However, they certainly look like a team that could go deep in the United States, Mexico and Canada.
The coach has also approached the England job through a very different lens to his predecessors, making moves that have not always been popular with the public or the media but that could make a real difference to his chances of doing what those who came immediately before him failed to do and leading the Three Lions to that long-awaited first trophy since 1966.
Getty Images Sport'Teams win trophies'
Tuchel's very first squad announcement back in March raised plenty of eyebrows. He brought Jordan Henderson back from the wilderness, gave Marcus Rashford a second chance four months after being cast aside by Manchester United and handed Dan Burn a first-ever call-up at the age of 32, as well as a debut to 18-year-old Myles Lewis-Skelly. With the benefit of hindsight, that now looks like the least controversial of his four squads.
Star man Jude Bellingham was the most high-profile omission for October's games against Wales and Latvia, while Phil Foden and Jack Grealish were also left out despite their excellent club form. All three played at the last World Cup while two of them started the Euro 2024 final. For Tuchel, though, the most important thing was to reward the players who had been responsible for the most productive and enjoyable camp of his spell so far a month earlier, when his side destroyed Serbia in their best performance of his tenure.
While many were aghast at the omissions of Foden, Bellingham and Grealish, as well as the the continued ignoring of Crystal Palace pass-master Adam Wharton, it was impossible to argue with Tuchel's reasoning when he declared: "We are trying to build a team. Teams win trophies, no one else."
And Anthony Gordon talked up the team ethic that the German coach has built after starring in the thrashing of Latvia. "Every performance, the commitment and the vibes and the attitude, everyone's giving everything and you can see that on the pitch," the Newcastle winger said. "It's that togetherness. You see on the pitch we're fighting and giving absolutely everything for each other which can be difficult in an international environment, because lads are coming from everywhere and we don't see each other often. The manager and the staff have really honed in on creating that [togetherness] and it's paid off."
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It was suggested to Tuchel that not including England's best players was 'radical', but he offered the perfect riposte: "For this moment, we stick with our choice and the radical statement is that we don’t collect the most talented players. We collect the guys who have the glue and cohesion to be the best team, because we need to arrive as the best team. We will arrive as underdogs at the World Cup because we haven’t won it for decades and we will play against teams who have repeatedly won it during that time. So we have to arrive as a team or we will have no chance."
Tuchel said he was taking cues from one of the greatest sporting dynasties in modern history, the New England Patriots, who won six Super Bowls in the space of 19 years following the turn of the century.
But there was another parallel much closer to home for him to learn from: The failure of England's so-called 'Golden Generation' of players that included David Beckham, Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard, Rio Ferdinand and John Terry. And the timing could not have been better from Tuchel's point of view, as Gerrard had just confessed in a podcast with Ferdinand how miserable he found the experience of playing for England.
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Gerrard, who was England's captain at the 2010 and 2014 World Cups as well as Euro 2012, never went beyond the quarter-finals at a major tournament, and admitted that he "hated" his experience with the national team. The Liverpool legend revealed that he spent most of his time alone in his room with nothing to do, feeling "low and down", and he conceded that he had almost no bond with the rest of the squad.
"It was like I didn’t feel part of a team. I didn’t feel connected with my team-mates with England," he explained. "I think we were all egotistical losers. Why couldn’t we connect as England team-mates back then? And I think it was down to the culture within England. All in our rooms too much. We weren’t friendly or connected. We weren’t a team. We never at any stage became a real good strong team."
For Tuchel, Gerrard's words were a gift, and he was delighted to expand on them in his press conference ahead of the Wales clash: "When I hear people talking about their titles in international football or their missed chances, I always hear the same song: we have been a team or we haven’t been a team. It is always the same song in international football. I also think it is the same headline in club football… If you stick together 24-7 for a nine-day period, and then as long as possible in America, you have to be a strong group."
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Sir Gareth Southgate is rightly credited for ensuring that playing for England was once more an enjoyable experience, and Gerrard said that the former coach was "underrated for how he connected with the England team". And yet by the end of his tenure, Southgate was making the same mistakes as his predecessors Sven-Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello.
While Eriksson and Capello could not resist playing Gerrard and Lampard together despite their similarities, Southgate insisted on starting Bellingham and Foden in all seven games at Euro 2024. He also persisted with Harry Kane even though his captain clearly lacked sharpness after recently returning from a back injury. Despite making it to the final and only losing to Spain courtesy of a late goal, England rarely looked like a cohesive team on the pitch in Germany, as they rarely produced good play and repeatedly relied on individual moments of brilliance.
Tuchel may well bring Foden or Bellingham back into the fold in time for the World Cup, especially if the Real Madrid midfielder returns to peak fitness after his spell out following shoulder surgery, and yet it matters not. The coach has already drawn a line between him and those who came before him by sending out a clear message that he is not afraid to drop anyone.
