It has been a fine week so far for Thomas Tuchel as he attempts the cyclical task of soldering together not just an England team, but a way of looking like one, all the while being battered by the to-and-fro conflicting winds of England managerdom. There is nothing new here. This is a job that involves not just picking the right players and making high-stakes calculations over your second-half substitutions, but carrying out these basic duties while wrestling with aggrieved members of the Thuggee cult on a collapsing rope bridge outside the Temple of Doom, and simultaneously having your heart ripped out.
No other nation makes quite the same twin-track demands. But also tell us who we are and how we should play. This is why the job will always take its pound of mince meat, why these people end up drained and hollowed out, an empty tracksuit resigning in the Wembley toilets, Roy Hodgson in Nice looking like a desiccated vampire, saying “I don’t know why I’m here”.
It is also why it was heartening in Rijeka to see Tuchel gripped with the familiar energies, still whirling about on the touchline in penitent black shoes and black trousers, looking as ever like a famine-ridden earl out taking the hounds for a walk, while simultaneously cracking the Enigma code in his hunting shed. It feels absurd to say that Tuchel is now safe in the job, if only because the idea he wouldn’t be is so hysterical. Tuchel was never realistically in any trouble.
But such is the nature of a role where you’re only ever a few rapid-fire defeats away from the incredible twin feat of a greatest-ever overseas World Cup and a near-instant heaving from the job. We should of course keep a sense of scale over a couple of Nations League wins against underpowered opponents. The 7-0 steamrollering of Croatia was always a strange affair.
From the moment the doors opened the whole occasion felt like a youth club association sports day, where everyone gets a medal at the end and the teachers do a disco dance routine. It was an atmosphere that seemed to communicate itself to the Croatia players even as they were warming up in a notably fun and jokey way, cheered by shrill groups of junior ultras, and blasted by the Croatian version of We Didn’t Start the Fire through the ear-shredding speaker system. Croatia played from the first minute like a team recovering from a dose of herbal sleeping tablets.
Luka Modric’s every touch was met with the kind of noise more usually associated with an appearance by a Korean boyband at an Apple Store launch event, but one of the great players of the age was simply run over by England’s youthful and hungry midfield. These are also the teams you play, however. Croatia were decent enough at the World Cup.
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