The dinosaurs roar at Thomas Tuchel

The appointment of Thomas Tuchel as manager of the England men’s national team has sent much of the press pack, along with, more predictably, the denizens of Elon Musk’s social media hellscape, mad. So mad, in fact, that the ordinarily hapless Football Association managing to procure the best available coach in the game, a man who could have the pick of Europe’s biggest clubs and a salary considerable north than anything England could offer, is depicted as making the nation “the laughing stock of the world game”.

Tuchel has won, among other things, the Champions League, World Club Cup, UEFA Super Cup, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 (twice). His predecessor, Gareth Southgate, was Premier League Manager of the Month in August 2008. (Incidentally, Southgate is praised by Mail Sport Reporter as a man who “wore the Three Lions on his shirt as a player and brought that force and pride into the job every day… he was one of us”, a different Southgate, presumably, to the one regularly pilloried as woke by the press pack for eight years). 

Tuchel could have commanded a far higher package at Manchester United, Barcelona or anywhere in Saudi Arabia. He chose the England job. Are we grateful? We are not.

Much of this criticism is achingly predictable. The senior ranks of Fleet Street’s press pack is still, to an extent, dominated by a literally dying breed of nicotine-flecked hacks who seem to think the game went when referees stopped wearing black, and that the BBC’s screening of women’s football comes straight from the pages of Das Kapital. Their views on Germany are still viewed through the prism of the second world war, a conflict they understand solely through close study of ‘Allo ‘Allo!.

The modern England fan’s view of Germany is far more nuanced, however. Yes, there is still the bonehead, aled-up minority who engage in 10 German Bombers and Two World Wars and One World Cup (four World Cups and one Wirtschaftswunder, the Germans may reply). But more delight in weekends away in Germany enjoying the country’s far superior football culture, one which hasn’t been sanitised out of existence. Find yourself in Dortmund one weekend and you’ll hear voices from Manchester, Walsall, Plymouth.

“Has nobody learned from the ‘take-the-money-and-run’ attitude of Sven-Göran Eriksson and Fabio Capello?,” bemoans Mail Sport Reporter, forgetting the outpouring of emotion in England this summer when the former passed away, having initially been welcomed to these shores by the Mail’s Jeff Powell writing, “We’ve sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness” (Capello, admittedly, may inspire less fond nostalgia).

Predictably, Nigel Farage has joined the howls of outrage, saying: “Why the hell can’t we have an English manager?”. (A reminder Farage knows nothing about football: in 2022 he demanded the FA leave Uefa due to its refusal to play God Save The King before Champions League games, a move which would not only deny English clubs European competition but make it impossible for England to qualify for the Euros or World Cup).

But Mail Sport Reporter makes one fair point. “What does this say about the English coaching system?”. Well, quite. It wasn’t supposed to come to this: the FA’s much-vaunted ‘England DNA’ inculcated through the £105m St George’s Park was supposed to provide a conveyor belt of progressive coaches through the age systems to the top job.

So far it has produced Southgate – accidentally promoted to the senior team after Sam Allardyce’s Truss-like tenure – and Lee Carswell, abruptly out of the running to replace him after putting out a team against Greece which resembled less a football formation and more an art project.

The other English name in the frame to succeed Southgate was Eddie Howe, pulling up few trees at Newcastle. The Premier League’s other three English managers are all currently in the bottom five. One-time coming man Graham Potter seems to be somewhere with Shergar.

Tuchel is not unproblematic. While a gifted coach, he is a combustible character who has fallen out with the authorities at pretty much every club he’s managed (although this may be less of an issue with the FA, who he won’t be able to hassle to sign a new striker).

But otherwise the FA is to be commended to ignore the jingoistic cries of the likes of the Mail and its ilk. Thomas Tuchel is a shrewd appointment – and, in two years’ time, when his exciting England side is bravely beaten on penalties by Argentina at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium in the semi-final of the World Cup, his nationality might even have been forgotten.