The horrors of Nice danced before our eyes. The ghost of Roy Hodgson stared desolately behind Thomas Tuchel’s shoulder and the faint outline of a world-weary young Harry Kane chugged over to take a phantom corner.
Here it was: another cinematic, epochal failure unfurling.
Thomas Tuchel would resign. The last two years would fold in on itself, in an instant the post-Southgate era repackaged as an hubristic folly; a sweeping away of the systemic stuff and a burning through resources for a Mourinho-style win-now surge at a tournament far beyond these players’ talents.
It would be another Capello and another Iceland rolled into one.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Worse was the terror of the familiar and the existential, was the nagging sense England are destined for an eternal purgatory. Sir Gareth, you were right all along.
“I felt it [was] easy today. We didn’t need to unlock something tactically. Every time they spoke to me, they were invested, they were clear.”
Tuchel keeps trying to teach us the same lesson and it isn’t our fault that we are so slow to learn it. It’s a minor miracle that his players are not afflicted like we are, that everything he does to elevate himself above his predecessors – or, more accurately, to lower the volume of the England job, turning it into any other role – is understood by those inside the camp.
Because the rest of us just can’t get our heads around how normal Tuchel is. He is not haunted by England’s past, sees no need to write a love letter to the national psyche or make it his mission to exorcise the pain of generational trauma.
And while he owes this in part to Southgate’s decade of detoxification it is mostly just that Tuchel doesn’t need to care so deeply. He can calmly watch, analyse, and adapt like the elite-level coach he is.
Step back and England’s win on Wednesday followed the pattern of any super-club victory against an inferior opponent. They were shocked by an early goal, recovered their composure after a swift hydration-break team talk, hammered at the door, and then finally made the breakthrough after substitutes and tactical tweaks exposed weakening opposition legs.
Remove all the angst projected onto the pitch by England fans and it was just a good manager doing a good job.
To be fair to Thomas Tuchel, he did try to warn us... pic.twitter.com/I3ecMjnVF0
— Match of the Day (@BBCMOTD) July 1, 2026
Tuchel, clearly, never felt the heat, to the extent that he was happy to downplay his own role when questioned by the media.
“The message was always the same,” Tuchel said after the game. “Keep on knocking, knocking, knocking. Keep believing. Keep on doing what we do. Don’t give in – you don’t give in. That’s what this team is about.
“While you’re trying to support and help, you get this feeling that players are free, players are not anxious. We didn’t play with fear. We played with determination and then we just didn’t accept it.”
This is partly (another) clever bit of spin from Tuchel, who knows that emphasising his players’ self-belief is far more important than massaging his own ego.
But then again he doesn’t need the praise because he doesn’t need this job in the same way as those before him. This is not the pinnacle of his career, not the paralysing moment in the spotlight decades in the making.
That means Tuchel can say the right things, but it also means that while the rest of us lose our heads he can make exactly the kind of tactical decisions that made him the standout candidate for the England job 18 months ago.
HARRY KANE FIRES ENGLAND AHEAD! ⚽🔥
— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) July 1, 2026
The captain's sensational strike puts the Three Lions 2-1 up against DR Congo 🚀✨ pic.twitter.com/sVidod2tPf
Kane was brilliant, but his winner could not have happened without the significant pattern shift that came earlier, first when Tuchel changed the two wingers (substitute Anthony Gordon got both assists) and then when he withdrew Djed Spence for Eberechi Eze, moving Declan Rice to right-back.
Rice, Bukayo Saka, and Eze - an Arsenal connection - combined down that side to create the opening for Kane’s headed equaliser, from which point it was clear England would accelerate away.
Tuchel saw the problem and fixed it. It is that simple.
Four matches into this World Cup and Tuchel keeps showing us the same person, keeps giving us the same note. It was calm and orderly tactical work that eviscerated Croatia, it was the same instinct that accepted the 0-0 against Ghana defined by a refusal to risk losing on the counter-attack, and it was another Premier League-level understanding of the task at hand that saw a comfortable dispatching of Panama.
Only traumatised England fans see Algeria in Ghana, Iceland in Congo.
Tuchel and his staff see “sharks” in Kane and Jude Bellingham, see a fearless team of winners getting the job done, and, with the caveat of some wobbly full-backs to be worked upon this week, they see a tournament more or less going to plan.
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