Dire Wembley friendlies may drain us – but England’s World Cup madness is swirling

Can you feel the madness swelling and swirling? The killing moon is overhead. The World Cup is still more than two months away but the collective mania is catching. Marc Guehi says “it’s not easy putting the shirt on” for a home friendly. Helplines are being established for anyone who endured both the Uruguay draw and Japan defeat. Are you Team Morgan or Jude, Cole or Phil, Edward or Jacob? Slabhead in or out? And where does Paul Scholes fit in?

Wembley’s gargantuan media centre was at capacity on Tuesday, boosted by the arrival of 60 Japanese journalists (World Cup fever is not a uniquely English phenomenon). Myopia has taken over to the extent “England are reliant on Harry Kane” is passing as a hot take. Thomas Tuchel, a man hired to not be Gareth Southgate, is being roundly panned for doing un-Gareth Southgate things, and of course being German. The players don’t arrive in Kansas for two months and writers are already frittering away their only permitted Wizard of Oz reference.

Of course, the recent results can be relatively easily explained away. Wembley friendlies invariably act as an energy vacuum, an exercise in how little noise 80,000 people can make, the room where it doesn’t happen. Against Japan, England were missing arguably their five best players. The starting XI had 12 senior international goals between them. Elliot Anderson and Kobbie Mainoo played like they had never met, which seems feasible, an unsuitable combination Tuchel nonetheless needed to trial. More than anything, it is extremely hard to motivate yourself for a game with no recognisable upside, eight months into a season that seems to have stolen something from all of us.

Perhaps the greatest concern is how the neurosis is affecting Tuchel. It turns out being repeatedly told your only function is to win the World Cup might mean the spectre of winning the World Cup consumes you to a dangerous extent. Ostracising Trent Alexander-Arnold, one of few uniquely brilliant English footballers ever, is a deeply weird, galaxy-brain decision in the Pep Guardiola-in-a-major-final school. Splitting the squad across two friendlies made sense in principle but was disastrous in practice.

And ambling about somewhere near the Japanese backline, pouting and performatively pressing, was False Nine Phil Foden. Foden’s 49 England caps have predominantly felt like dumping the family dog on a mountainside and expecting it to find food and shelter, a systems player stripped from his system, not understanding a world without his bedtime cuddles and Erling Haaland being triple-marked. Tuchel believing he could be a functioning stand-in for Kane, even with systemic tweaks, is genuinely concerning, but he appears to have viewed these matches as final chances for experimentation. Experiments failing now is a far better situation than it happening in June.

Of course, these games were only ever deckchairs on the Titanic, content machine fodder, FA revenue padding. An Arlington afternoon in June regularly tops 30C. At least two of Tuesday’s starters will inevitably be injured, a host more freshly available. The actual warm-up matches, against New Zealand and Costa Rica in Florida, are more than two months away. Different problems will arise, with different solutions. Experimentation never ends.

Tuchel and his players’ great challenge is finding a way to stave off the madness, to isolate themselves in a way that doesn’t just intensify the pressure. Flirting with success has made the nation’s relationship with the men’s team more transactional and narrow, expectations higher and patience thinner. England have always done a fine trade in bad games, but now every bad England game is a new low for both entertainment and morality, a public scan exposing some irredeemable rot.

But this is a reminder of the men’s team’s place in the national consciousness: an excuse to climb lampposts and keep pubs open past midnight, to lob perfectly good pints at strangers and scream into the void, to feel something, anything. A major tournament is one of the few remaining monocultural events, a rare chance for something approaching unified and unadulterated joy. Friendlies are almost always hives of apathy, creating a void of feeling that has to be filled with booing Ben White.

So much of the recent outrage is just a response to recognising that victory is a feasible outcome, an act of self-protection. England have not started a World Cup as the bookies’ favourites since 1970, but are on course to do so. Knockout football is more contingent on fortune than anyone ever wants to admit; a deflection here, a soft penalty there. In the right light, this is possible, a reality which will gradually drive everyone involved insane. Expect witchhunts and clamour and your uncle who has never knowingly watched a football match calling for Adam Wharton to start. The madness is only just setting in. How deep can it go?

Photograph by Robin Jones/Getty Images