It was the 68th minute when Jarrod Bowen and Anthony Gordon trotted down the steps, stripped and ready to come on. As they waited on the touchline, Thomas Tuchel leaned conspiratorially close, imparting crucial last-minute tactical instructions. You, go left. You, attack this half-space. You, spin him around the diagonal. You, watch for the trapezium pass. Or whatever. I don’t really understand a lot of the jargon they use these days.
Meanwhile Bowen and Gordon listened intently, waiting for the break in play. And waited. And kept waiting. The clock ticked over to 69, 70, 71 minutes. Tuchel was still delivering little tactical messages. You, show him the roses. You, click-clack, flip-flap, bing-bong. You, always on the shoulder blade, always perceiving. On the field, England were still patiently passing the ball around, not out of any particular urgency or desire but just because it seemed to feel quite nice.
Seventy-two minutes. Seventy-three minutes. Still England knitted their little crochet patterns in midfield. You, remember what we said about squeeze zones. You, find the golden slant. You, always bringing the intensity between the moments, inside the moments. By this time Morgan Rogers had joined them.
Finally, in the 74th minute, the ball went out of play for an Albania goal-kick and the substitutions could take place. Tuchel had talked a lot in the previous week about wanting to see “hunger” in his team. And certainly it is hard to imagine three men more grateful to enter a football pitch as Bowen, Gordon and Rogers as they bounded over the white line towards freedom.
Here, perhaps, the clearest expression of the paradox at the heart of Tuchel’s new England project: extreme patience wrapped in extreme impatience. Ever since he crossed the St George’s Park threshold in January the overarching message has been one of urgency. The World Cup is already close. Time is already running out. Every nanosecond we have together is precious. As for the football itself, however: well, that’s going to involve quite a lot of waiting.
On the face of it, a 2-0 victory with just 12 shots suggests a certain tactical restraint, perhaps even a kind of turgidity. But for all the sterile possession-football there were also signs of genuine invention here if you were looking closely enough, and in particular in that most quintessentially English of problem areas: the left-hand side.
Marcus Rashford on the attack against Albania. The striker showcased his improved workrate since moving on loan to Aston Villa. Photograph: Graham Hunt/ProSports/Shutterstock
Cast your mind back to the yawning waste of everyone’s time that was last summer’s Euros campaign and England’s left flank was basically a plague zone. Nothing went in and nothing came out. After the Denmark game, one deeply-pretentious broadsheet correspondent compared playing the right-footed Kieran Trippier at left-back to writing an entire paragraph without using the letter A. The result – in both cases – was basically indigestible.
Here, on the other hand, was a left flank with all the vowels, with diphthongs and triphthongs, semivowels and even the odd rhotic. The sudden emergence of Myles Lewis-Skelly at left-back feels like a kind of divine housewarming gift: an actual left-footer, one with the engine to get up and down the pitch, the poise to contribute goals and assists. Tuchel’s last two club sides were built on the marauding width of Ben Chilwell and Alphonso Davies, and Lewis-Skelly could easily perform a similar function for him now.
His debut goal was a genuinely lovely moment, as well as a move of the highest quality: a luxurious pass from the sumptuous Jude Bellingham, Lewis-Skelly timing the run and the finish to perfection. Meanwhile, the space was created for him by an intelligent decoy run from Marcus Rashford, who on his return to international football displayed the value of a specialist in that position.
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Rashford faded a little as the game went on. Not everything he tried came off. But for a player basically written off at this level, sucked deep into the Manchester United abyss, it has been a stunning return to form, a reminder that this is a player of rhythm and confidence, who needs to feel good to do good. His work off the ball was ferocious. His relentless running in behind was a reminder of what he brings to this role that – say – Phil Foden and Jack Grealish do not.
More impressive still were the little variations. Curtis Jones occasionally tucking into left-back, Toni Kroos-style. Lewis-Skelly stepping into midfield, or occasionally going on the underlap while Rashford stayed high and wide. Not to kick a man when he’s clearly building a lucrative speaking career, but this is the sort of tactical nuance we so rarely saw under Gareth Southgate. And particularly towards the end, when the entire project was essentially collapsing under the weight of its own star wattage, players freelancing in the absence of a cogent plan.
Tuchel brings this, at least. Tuchel is all about the plans and the details. And yes, maybe Anthony Gordon is a better long-term option, and maybe Lewis-Skelly needs to be tested against better opposition, and maybe people just really like new things. But in this respect at least, it was a cautiously encouraging night for Tuchel and for England: a team patiently, but impatiently, in the process of rebalancing itself.
