Thoughts on the World Cup

So...... That was in fact a tournament that the English did in fact play in. By the English, I of course mean the England men's national team. Whilst I stayed up all night waiting for ol' Tommy T to give me a ring, I unfortunately came away from my attempt to get free plane tickets to the US bitterly disappointed.

As a start, I think it's worth putting out there that I don't think Tuchel should go. People will forget (and have in fact started to forget even so soon as now) about how well he managed the Mexico match (and to a lesser extent Norway), and how much of his pedigree as a knockout specialist has come in clutch for us this tournament. At the outset of it all, if you'd come up to me and told me we'd make the semis, I can't say I would have been particularly disappointed with that.

However, it always sucks to go out. Especially to Argentina, and especially so late on in a game. And let's not pretend Tuchel didn't make any mistakes, the substitutions were either straight-up bad or at the very least premature. You can't try to play defensively with a one-goal lead against the team with - in my view at least - the 2nd best player in the history of the beautiful game, or against the team that's managed to come up with late-stage winners so reliably all throughout this tournament. Against Spain, I reckon that bringing on Dan Burn probably would've been a solid idea. Maybe it would have even worked against France, but this was a bridge too far.

I understand wanting to bring Rice off. Declan Rice may well be the most overworked footballer in the world right now, playing as a completely indispensable part of both the Arsenal and England squads, and being possibly the best 8 in the world right now. If we had won the World Cup, we could have expected to see him in the top 3 for the Ballon d'Or, as little as that award actually matters.

But England knew this. In fact, we knew this so well that we brought along the exact person who could have been an energetic part of our midfield.

Since Opta decided to pull a fast one on the entire football analysis community earlier this year, I unfortunately can't get up particularly good stats for how well Kobbie Mainoo can play, but a site by the name of DataMB claims to have all the answers, so we can see what their thoughts are about our dynamo from the Red Devils.

If you look at his stats from his last season in the Premier League, everything seems pretty good save his progressive passes. Obviously that's not ideal, but Anderson can clearly make up for a lot of that deficiency in his play, and Pickford was ironically one of our most progressive players from after the first Argentinian goal last night, so nothing to lose sleep over. It would've been a lot of fun to see him come on, but no, Gordon (who scored!) comes off for Ezri Konsa. I don't want to see everyone start piling on Konsa, but he is, and I'm sure he'd be the first to admit this, a centre-back. Centre backs don't tend to be the greatest attacking options unless you're at least 5 minutes into added time, you're down a goal, and your name's Harry Maguire (who I think Tuchel was honestly right to leave out of the squad, but that's an entirely different can of worms that I don't want to get into right now).

To take a phrase from sportsball across the pond, defences win championships (except they tend to spell defence wrong), and you see that as a through line through a lot of our knockout games. Obviously we put up the best show I've seen 11 men in an England shirt put on since a couples of blokes down the pub managed to balance a pint glass on their noses and foreheads at the same time against Mexico. A lot of us are never going to forget that game, and we shouldn't. If you're interested in starting a petition to give Dan Burn a knighthood, email me, maybe this can be the start of something. But Tuchel took that and made what was simultaneously the worst mistake he could make and the easiest, most seductive mistake he could make.

He bet on us doing it one more time.

I understand the temptation, I understand that it made sense for him to try one last roll of the dice. Any team that ever wins a World Cup has to ride their luck to some extent, but maybe Tuchel didn't realise that most of England's luck was already spent; maybe he didn't realise that the hype around him and the hype around his team wasn't quite as close to the truth as he believed in that moment. It wasn't an obvious mistake to him when he made it, and I'm sure he was the first person in the world to realise just what he'd done, but of course by then it was too late.

He's a fantastic manager, he's won almost everything there is going, and he managed Mainz at one point, which will always give him some credit with me. I'm sure he knows exactly what went wrong and how to fix it, and he's clearly a fantastic manager, which is why it hurts to see people calling for him to get the sack.

If England sacked every manager who didn't win, we wouldn't have made two consecutive Euros finals and be living through the most consistently good time in English international football since 1966. Hell, Alf Ramsey would have gone after the '64 Euros and we would probably never have won the Jules Rimet on home soil.

It's patience. There's a lot less of it, certainly at club level, than there used to be. One of the more stable jobs, ironically, has been the England gig. It would really suck to see that part of the club game get sucked into the international one, because managers just have so much less time to coach a national team as opposed to a club side. When a manager only has a few weeks every year to get across their principles to their national side, it becomes even more important that those principles be consistent.

Sorry, that was a bit of a long-winded way of saying that we shouldn't be too hasty, and I didn't even get to talk about Djed Spence's best performance in an England shirt, Harry Kane continuing to be absolutely fantastic, or Jude Bellingham being the new face of the Three Lions.

I have actually registered a place to put all my football-related thoughts, so hopefully I'll be able to talk tech a little more on this site from now on!

Cheers for giving me the chance to go on and on and on, and hopefully you enjoyed it at least a little. The subscribe button is somewhere if for some God-forsaken reason you want this in your inbox.

Alex