England’s simple problem – running into a team that is better

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And now, at last, we come to the area of football in which England excels. Thomas Tuchel’s team’s spell as a relevant force in this World Cup might have come to an end, right on time, at the semi-final stage, beaten by an Argentinian team that were not only smarter and braver but also ultimately significantly better at football than them, but really that is just a prelude to the real business: the bit where we all get to work out whose fault it is.

Obviously, first and foremost, the finger of blame has been pointed at the nefarious Argentinians. Never let it be said that the English are anything less than magnanimous in defeat. The Telegraph yesterday published a list of the 31 acts of aggression Argentina perpetrated against Tuchel’s brave English boys. In the Times, Matthew Syed called the world champions “dirty.” 

Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats and therefore in theory an actual grown-up, demanded that the players who had displayed a banner proclaiming Argentine sovereignty over the Falkland Islands be banned from playing in the final.

We can – although we should not – leave aside the fact that all of this flirts a little too closely with highly racialised tropes of Latin Americans for the time being; we should focus instead not just on how childish, how ungracious this is, but on the rank hypocrisy on show.

Did Argentina spend the first 20 minutes riling the English on purpose? Did they rotate the identity of the players committing these fouls so that they avoided bookings? Did they allow themselves a small smile when Elliott Anderson took the bait and barrelled into Lionel Messi, earning himself a booking, or when Jude Bellingham started to act out his frustration? Yes. Of course they did. 

Are any of these fabled dirty tricks things that England’s players would not deign to attempt? No. Of course they’re not. Watch Harry Kane narrate a game to a referee. Watch him invite contact to win a penalty. Watch literally all of these players every week in the Premier League. It’s a World Cup semi-final. Nobody involved is there to get gold stars for good behaviour. 

But the traditions of the post-tournament inquest dictate that none of this is enough. Establishing that England had lost because Argentina tricked them is much too close to suggesting that maybe Argentina were just better than them for comfort. And that does not really fit in the longstanding worldview of English football, in which primacy is basically considered innate.

That means the fire must be turned inwards, which is where the real fun starts. At various points yesterday, word started to leech out of the England camp that Tuchel’s substitutions, in which he threw on three defensive players when England were leading by a goal, were in fact incredibly attacking. 

The introductions of Dan Burn, Ezri Konsa and Nico O’Reilly, he said, were in fact designed to help England relieve the mounting pressure, rather than merely absorb it. He had encouraged them to play higher. They just hadn’t listened.

It didn’t take long for the counterbriefing to emerge. The players, it turned out, had been so surprised by Tuchel’s defensive caution that they had decided to complete just two passes in an 18-minute spell in the middle of the second half, elite football’s equivalent of a principled dirty protest. They thought he wanted them to sit back. It wasn’t their fault. 

Quite where the truth of this lies is anyone’s guess, really; it is a case of choose your fighter. The greater concern, once the administrative detail of Saturday’s third-place/Kylian Mbappé stat-padding exercise is completed, is whether it hints at a greater fracture between manager and squad; Tuchel’s position, bolstered by his extended contract, was deeply destabilised by the complete tactical failure – whatever the cause – of Atlanta. This is what he is meant to be good at; he did not deliver.

That would be quite enough, of course, but what really separates England when it comes to inquests is the inflationary quality they take on. Tuchel was asked immediately after the game if the defeat indicated some great failure of Englishness, some fatal flaw that needs to be addressed if the country is ever to taste true success again.

This logic is enticing – that’s what watching players boot the ball away, over and over, will do to you – but it does rather ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of his squad is drawn from the elite of the Premier League and Champions League. All of them were perfectly honed in state-of-the-art academies. They are being accused of reverting to a type of football that they have, most likely, never even seen, let alone learned.

Where is the truth? It is possible that it is a little bit of everything, a series of factors that compounded each other in the white heat of one of the biggest games most of that team will ever play. But it does feel as though one element is being missed, deliberately ignored, or maybe purposefully obfuscated. Is it not more likely that, rather than there being some grand problem with the way England thinks about football, what happened against Argentina is the same as happened against Italy and France and Croatia in years only just gone by: England ran into a team that was, ultimately, better.

Photograph by AP Photo/George Walker IV