LONDON — For all the talk of new eras, fresh starts and building an England ready to win, you would be hard pressed to find much different between Thomas Tuchel’s first two games in charge and many of the 35 qualifiers Gareth Southgate shepherded the Three Lions through (28 wins, six draws, one defeat).
This 3-0 win over Latvia played out as any number of England occasions have in recent memory. For all the questions in the build up — how will Declan Rice cope as a single pivot, why the trust in Marcus Rashford, is Myles Lewis-Skelly first choice left back now — the real issues at hand were not actually to do with the home team. How long could the Latvian low block hold out? Would they take the one or two chances that might come their way and really put the cat among the pigeons? When the visiting legs inevitably buckle, how many will Harry Kane add to his goal tally?
This is just the European game in the inter-tournament years. Between the aristocracy and the shrinking group of cannon fodder (your Andorras, San Marinos and Liechtensteins) is a mass of teams who can be fairly frisky on their day, but who, in sight of the best of the best, tend to drop into their shells. As the rapidly emptying Wembley reflected at the final whistle, it is not much fun to watch the big guys repeatedly bounce up and down until cracks emerge. Even when a brilliant Reece James missile delivers the first fissure.
Happily at least, the former Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich boss who now leads England will not be unfamiliar with coaching around a talent mismatch. Whatever the level, the wage imbalance, the star power, breaking down a diligent low block is a pretty gruelling task. Going off the squadron of paper airplanes patrolling the Wembley sky after 10 minutes, a fanbase where many had grown disillusioned with Gareth Southgate was not utterly enamored with the new boss.
Then again, if the opposition aren’t going to leave their own third of the pitch when you have the ball, if they are going to show no inclination to apply pressure on you, there are only so many ways of advancing the ball into dangerous positions. Against Latvia, England tried all of them.
Jude Bellingham put you in mind of the second strikers imported to the English game in the 1990s, his understanding of space light years ahead of his opponents. Picking the ball up in the narrow corridor between the Latvian lines, he had space to turn, defenders on his shoulder to be brushed through like autumn leaves. One day he is going to score an all-time solo goal for England.
On the other side of the field Morgan Rogers and Jarrod Bowen dovetailed effectively, the latter all flicks and darts to take the hosts into the box. Throughout his first camp, Tuchel has made a point of wanting to dominate the opposition in term of penalty box touches. In replacing Curtis Jones with Rogers, the new boss shifted the center of gravity quite significantly. England were now setting up camp right outside the Latvia box rather than the five or 10 yards further back they had been against Albania. Add Myles Lewis-Skelly as a true inverted left back and the field was titled like the final levels on Super Monkey Ball.
For most of this game, the problem wasn’t that England were committing too few players into the box, a la the bad days with Southgate. If anything there were too many white shirts getting in the way. Marcus Rashford was on hand to get in the way of Jude Bellingham’s goal bound header; that wasn’t the only time an England player got in the way of his teammate’s effort.
A little more space was all that was required. James had plenty of that 25 yards out, clearing out other interested parties before bending a free-kick into the top corner that could only be described as Beckham-esque. That the floodgates didn’t immediately open spoke more to the diligence with which Latvia went about their task. There seemed to be just enough bodies to send Rashford a bit wider, to force Bellingham to check back one more time. If Vladislavs Gutkovskis hadn’t miscued in front of an open goal — Marc Guehi crashing into Jordan Pickford and toepoking the ball away from him — they might have been able to bait an England wobble.
Instead, they faced the slow grind. Lewis-Skelly’s precise pass through the lines found Bellingham, who rolled the ball for Kane to drag wide. Substitute Eberechi Eze’s aggressive ball-carrying was just what the moment called for. Then Rice went cantering on the overlap, his cutback leaving Kane with only an empty net ahead of him. Eze added a third with quick feet and the sort of deflection that hadn’t favored Bellingham or Rogers.
In almost every fashion then, this was England as they were before. It is probably England as they will be a long way into the future. Only when the big teams roll onto the fixture list will Tuchel’s impact really be apparent. So… sometime in the latter stages in America next summer?
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