Walking away from Dallas Stadium, feet throbbing in the heat of the late-evening Texas tarmac, it was tempting to picture the scene inside England’s dressing room three hours earlier, the score 2-2 at half-time against a perky Croatia, with Thomas Tuchel’s side in danger of slipping into a familiar tournament pattern of entropy and angst.
What exorcism was performed here? Did England’s players burn a ceremonial John Lewis merino wool slim-fit quarter zip? Did Tuchel deliver his calm, tactically focused half-time speech while simultaneously sawing the head off the life-size Gareth Southgate effigy the team still carries around with it, before inviting his players to whack it like a piñata, open letters tumbling from the waistcoat pockets, leadership mottoes and worries about penalties scattered across the floor as its bearded and frowning head steadily deflates, a moment of pure era-shedding catharsis?
There are no second acts in American World Cup lives. Except, it turns out, if your manager can find the right words after a first half during which England played episodic, mechanical football, when they seemed to be still in the old-mannered routines, assembling their siege towers and engines of war, football reduced to the status of stuff that happens in between corners.
It would be wrong to describe that second half as a shedding of the Gareth shaped homunculus on this team’s back. But sometimes you do have to stop trusting the process, change the patterns, and basically just run forward with a great deal more aggression. England burnt an effigy of everything they used to be in the second half in Dallas. Is it real? And where will it lead them across the next two games and five weeks beyond that?
The most notable part was the sense of seeing an era-shift happen in real time. If the first half felt like the least flattering notes of Southgate-ism, the second was something closer to whatever it is Tuchel wants England to do now, hunters not gatherers, a team that believes it can actively win games of football rather than waiting for its opponents to die of old age.
This was a genuine break from the usual narrative pattern of these occasions, those days where England fade and wilt, the football of the plodding drum. Instead England had more, not less, energy as the game progressed. They took 22 shots at goal, three-quarters of them in that second half. In their last tournament opener, the 1-0 win against Serbia, they had four shots all game and played like a team trying to run a marathon inside a Victorian diving suit.
Nobody with any sense of scale is suggesting England are now ready to win a World Cup, or that they didn’t look like a team that could just as easily lose one in Dallas. But there are positives. They have now played a proper fixture and beaten a good team, both firsts in the Tuchel era. Key attacking players have scored and assisted. Marcus Rashford, an excellent impact sub, looked happy and loose and frankly quite alarming to all those tiring 30-something defenders out there.
Plus, with all due respect to the cultural impact of Southgate’s England, we got a glimpse in Dallas of what a genuinely elite tactical manager might do with that legacy. There will be a lot of talk about The Surge, that period after half-time when England basically ran all over Croatia, as the midfield pressed harder up the pitch and played more aggressive and more accurate vertical passes.
Tuchel talked afterwards about England’s fans enjoying this spectacle in the pub, and there is a point here about connection, the way people want to see their team play, the way England fans support the team. The Surge wasn’t exactly pub football, four-pints football. It felt more chemical, more wired and wild-eyed, football of the pre-match buttock-launching firework party.
The point has been made that England played like a Premier League team, but they were more like a Premier League team of the 2000s, all galloping adrenaline, running power, the can’t-live-with-it thrusts. This is not in itself a recipe for victory against elite opponents. But the key is that this team has that in its chamber. The ability to overwhelm is in there. The backpack is loaded with ordnance. The Surge was a warning to the rest of the field that while you will have chances to take this team down, you’re also going to get clipped yourself.
Tuchel’s substitutions were also progressive. At 3-2 up the England playbook states that you protect and fall back. But Tuchel did not reach for Jordan Henderson, who really does appear to be present here as the midfield equivalent of an emotional support dog. Instead he sent on three attackers, then rejigged again as the midfield began to look a little open.
It would also be wrong to overlook the good bits in that first half. The set-piece threat is a genuine asset, and England really should have scored twice more from corners. Even the first-half penalty carried some vindication of Tuchel’s selection policy, a foul caused by one very quick, agile footballer outmanoeuvring a 40-year-old. This will happen when that’s how you stack your team. England may lack some craft, but they can also be physically horrible to play against.
It was a good post-match for Tuchel too, one where he still jabbed a little at Jude Bellingham, even after his best game for England. “He has learnt to be a team player,” was Tuchel’s verdict, which is quite funny and salty and naggy. Keep Bellingham hungry. Make him want to prove things. This feels like a good line.
There was merit too in the unusually chippy half-time chat from Anthony Barry, a reflection of the fact Tuchel doesn’t care about upsetting people, doesn’t follow the regimental line of sombre deference and respect for fame and status.
Instead Tuchel has a refreshing brusqueness as England manager, like the Victorian stepfather who will slap you on the back as he sends you off to boarding school, but who really doesn’t want to hear anything about doubt, fear, flags, heavy shirts and so on. It is a major asset, used right, for a team that had become a bit mannered and sombre in its previous guises.
There are clearly elements for England to fix. Luka Modric is more gnarled these days: less little boy dressed up as a witch, more former four-time surfing champion of middle-earth. He was eventually harried from the pitch in Dallas. But England’s midfield is still a problem. The spacing felt wrong in the first half. Declan Rice is carrying an injury. Midfield is always key in knockout football, in those periods when the ability to control the tempo becomes the key asset. Do they have the ability to play that way too now?
The defence also looks rusty. England’s starting attack fitted the Tuchel model of energy and speed, but also looked thin on paper. The good news is England’s starting front three in Dallas have 85 goals between them. The bad news is 81 of those have been scored by Harry Kane. This had better work, Thomas.
The good news is Kane looked happy in the system, with runners ahead of him and space to drop deep. Even his retaken penalty carried a premonition of the half-time re-gearing. There are no second acts in American lives. Except when a goalkeeper has clearly encroached by leaving his goalline. The retake was just right. Don’t stutter and wait, Harry. Spank it into the corner.
Does any of it mean much in the longer term? England don’t often start well, even in their better summers. We remember the last-gasp burgle against Tunisia on the fly-ravaged banks of the Volga, the 1-1 against Ireland in 1990, which felt like watching a medieval game of bladder wrestle in a Gloucestershire village.
There is also a long way to go. You don’t win it by running riot for 10 minutes in mid-June. But there was something different here, and Tuchel is their key asset in this regard, if only as a point of difference, the polar opposite of sclerotic tactical caution and the weight of caring a little too much. Whatever happens from here this feels like progress. England: now available in fun form.
