If you want to truly understand the magnitude of your team’s victory and find a context that isn’t coloured by your own bias then listen to the thoughts of your fallen opponents.
Very occasionally they will lavish your side with praise while refusing to take any of the blame. Those are the elite performances. Sometimes they will ‘hold their hands up’ to the better team while bemoaning that more could have been done, another sign the win really was about your strength and not their weakness.
Then there’s the third option - when the captain, legend, and national treasure declares himself “ashamed” of a “catastrophic night”, as a broken Luka Modric did on Saturday night.
Those wins? They aren’t really worth very much.
No 7-0 win (or equivalent) has ever championed its victor, has defined a positive pathway for the winner.
Manchester United beating Arsenal 8-2 was about the chasm Arsene Wenger had allowed to open up between the once-great rivals. People scarcely remember which teams inflicted 9-0 defeats on Southampton in consecutive seasons.
Even Germany beating Brazil 7-1 is remembered as an epochal crisis for the hosts, not the crowning glory of the Germans’ run to lifting the World Cup.
Attempting to quantify the meaning of England’s thrashing of Croatia is difficult enough, then, before you get onto the eerie atmosphere provided by the stadium ban that wasn’t; by 6000 shrieking school children making a mockery of the Nations League as competitive football.
A lot of people will find this take unnecessarily harsh.
Thomas Tuchel was resoundingly criticised for England’s cowering collapse in the World Cup semi-final in Atlanta but since then his team have scored 17 goals in four matches of rip-roaring attacking football, in the process securing their best finish at a World Cup since 1966, taking world champions Spain all the way, and – after the Croatia win – reasserting the logic of Tuchel’s Premier League-inspired attempts to instil high-intensity attacking football.
And there have been signs of progress. The front four of Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham, Anthony Gordon and Bukayo Saka looks sublime. Alex Scott has the classy touch of Adam Wharton but with more Iraola-crafted bite than the languid Crystal Palace player, giving England the bench option they will need for the next time they find themselves panic-stricken in the closing stages of a knockout game. Lewis Hall is the left-back, that’s settled now.
As significant, perhaps, has been Tuchel’s repeated discussion of the Argentina game and the “scar” that remains.
“I've said many times, we will always have a scar, we will always feel pain and disappointment,” he told reporters after the Croatia win. “That is the way it is but this is the way to move forward.”
That way is doubling down on the principles that began his tenure and began the World Cup, too, when that surge of energy saw England beat Croatia 4-2 in the group stages. But therein lies the reason to doubt the last fortnight.
We’ve been here before, as recently as June. Thrashing substandard opposition, or taking part in a crowd-pleasing ding-dong battle in a glorified friendly, tell us nothing about the psychological blockage that Tuchel suffered from in the US.
On the pitch, that is, because off it, we can – if we’re being charitable – see the seeds of something new. The swagger of the performances tell us nothing alone, but the number of times Tuchel has discussed the “scar” of June does hint at a genuine watershed moment for him and, therefore, for his players.
It is one thing to up the tempo in reaction to the muted 30 minutes in Atlanta. It’s another to keep telling us how wounded he is, how deep the trauma sits within the camp. That, maybe, suggests he really is feeling humbled; is ready to evolve, rebuild, learn.
“We adjusted some stuff after the World Cup and we played in the same manner in all three matches,” Tuchel added. “We are getting better at it and the team buys into it, this is the most important.
“This is the only way to move forward, even if you still feel pain. You have to play with the pain if you still feel the disappointment. You have to play with it, that is the nature of sport.”
After an extended international break that’s felt like nothing more than light-hearted fun, too breezy to breed confidence or forgiveness in supporters, those words offer something approaching newsworthy - and a pathway back.
Pin your own failure to the wall, build an origin story around it. Feel the pain, get angry, and stay angry until the Euros begin in England two years from now.
The only problem with that, of course, is momentum cannot be halted at any point. There’s no space for an uncomfortable November, for a lazy March. Certainly there is no room for anything less than another high-scoring victory against Czechia on Tuesday at Wembley.
It’s hardly fair to demand of Tuchel a constant string of 5-0s and 6-0s until the Euros begin in summer 2028.
But the scar hasn’t healed, nor can it even begin to without consistently assertive performance that signal to fans that this team is ready to turn a corner; that this team is, in fact, as fearless now as they should have been in July.
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