Gareth Southgate spent years wrestling with the question of the identity of his England team. The challenge was to build something out of nothing, and a style that belonged to the England teams themselves and not just the clubs. Sparking and then protecting that flame became his life’s work.
But on Thomas Tuchel’s first media day as England head coach on Friday, as he announced his first squad, he had a simpler answer: the style of his team would be that of the Premier League.
“The Premier League is a very physical league, a very physically demanding league, a very direct league,” Tuchel said at Wembley Stadium. He spoke with a clear sense of the traditional strengths of English football, which he sees as overlapping with the strengths of the league. He spoke with the purpose of someone who wants to bring these characteristics to his England team.
It was the first time we got any sense of what Tuchel’s England will look like. He wants to tap into something distinctly English. “We should be proud enough of the culture and the style of English football and the English league to implement this,” he said.
If this works, it will mean building an England team that looks different from the team of recent years.
Everyone knows that club and international football have diverged over the last generation, that the international game tends to be slower, more cautious and more conservative. If you want high quality, high speed synchronised play, you find it at the superclubs. It has generally felt as if there is a template to winning in international football: picking a balanced team, playing a structured defensive game, prioritising clean sheets and set pieces, understanding that tournaments are not won by the team who gets the most talent on the pitch, nor by who plays the most exciting football.
This was the lesson of Portugal winning Euro 2016, or France winning the World Cup in 2018. It was a lesson that Southgate internalised. And it led him towards his own style of play, the much-maligned ‘Gazball’. People complained about the approach, its rigidity, its predictability, its functionality. But if its function was reaching the serious end of major tournaments, it was hard to quibble. England reached two finals, one semi-final and a quarter-final in four tournaments under Southgate.
Tuchel arriving to speak to the media at his first squad announcement (Andrew Redington/Getty Images)
But listening to Tuchel talk, you felt that might be over. Tuchel has been nothing but respectful about Southgate and interim head coach Lee Carsley but he was open about what he wants to change. “We need to increase the rhythm and intensity of our game compared to our last matches,” he said bluntly.
Tuchel does not buy the argument that the nature of international football demands a slower, more cautious game. He did not talk about emulating Didier Deschamps’ minimalist French side or Fernando Santos’ successful but ultimately unwatchable Portugal team. He talked about emulating faster Premier League football. “We will inject a little bit of club football into federation football,” as he put it.
“We have to increase the intensity in our games,” he said. “The intensity, the rhythm. I want to have more touches in the opponents’ box. I want to have more ball recoveries in the opponents’ half.”
International football does not always lend itself to pressing, not least because it tends to be done by exhausted players in the heat of summer, but Tuchel wants to give it a go. He sounded like a consultant who had walked into a new business and wanted to know why people were not doing something that should be so obvious to them.
“I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t play a high press in the next matches,” he said. “This is common sense. It happens every time in the Premier League, it happens every three days, the players are exposed to that. So why not bring it (to England)?”
Tuchel knows that it will be a challenge to get his ideas across to his new players quickly. He will only meet them all for the first time on Monday and will have three training sessions before his first game on Friday. He has 60 contact days with the players before the World Cup in North America next summer. But he still has to try, and promised a ‘crash course’ in the football he wants to play.
Listening to Tuchel explain some of his picks, you could see how important physicality and pressing will be. He went for Dominic Solanke over Ivan Toney, for example, which he called a “a very close decision”, but Solanke’s eager and intelligent closing down was surely part of his thinking.
Tuchel said Anthony Gordon got the nod over Jack Grealish because he was in better rhythm. On Marcus Rashford, Tuchel specifically pointed to his improvements “against the ball” since moving to Aston Villa on loan from Manchester United in February. On Harry Kane, Tuchel explained how there will be no “exceptions” to the pressing demands, but that he was confident the England captain could do it. No one will play for this team if they cannot bring the right energy without the ball.
“It’s easier said than done because every team presses a little bit different, and every team attacks a little bit different, so we need to align our ideas,” he said. “This is our job to make it quickly understandable, to make it easier to transform onto the pitch, on and off the ball, and still give the players the freedom to express themselves. This is the job and this is what I mean: we want to see glimpses of the Premier League in the national team.”
(Top photo: Andrew Redington/Getty Images)
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