Tuchel missed an open goal when he said no to a B&B

Very flat, Kansas. Yet not completely so. Topographers of the midwest US state observe “a gradual elevation rise from east to west”, which is to say a gentle incline occurring over about 400 miles. So I suppose we can invoke the old joke about Norfolk: not flat and boring; slightly undulating and boring.

Yet it’s Kansas where England have chosen to be based for this summer’s World Cup, specifically at The Inn at Meadowbrook, a relatively modest, bland-looking, 54-room new-build in slightly featureless parkland.

But don’t say it’s in the middle of nowhere: it’s only a 10-minute drive from the Overland Park Farmers’ Market which, my research shows, was rated “Best Farmers’ Market in the state of Kansas” by Cooking Light magazine in 2016. Also, being just outside Kansas City, it hands Thomas Tuchel a great dad joke opportunity because every time the squad returns to the hotel, he can loudly say, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more”, and, surely, this will never not be funny.

However, “nowhere special” is sort of the point. “We chose a hotel where you can open the window,” said Tuchel. “We chose a hotel where it’s an intimate and small place.” Not big, corporate or showy, then; “a home from home”.

Nothing new here for England. The high tidemark for what historians now define as England’s “complimentary slippers era” was reached in Germany in 2006, when a squad that included Gary Neville swanked about in hooded bath robes and an overweening sense of entitlement at the Schlosshotel Bühlerhöhe mountain-top spa resort. England went out in the quarter-finals that year, and the provision of six-star accommodation for patently three-star teams began to chafe somewhat on a weary public.

Reading the room, Gareth Southgate went small and intimate for Russia in 2018, and again in Qatar. And those of us who hoped to see Tuchel not just follow the culture he inherited but actively advance it, are again feeling a bit disappointed. Because if you really want to do “home from home” in America, surely you don’t go hotel at all; you go bed and breakfast.

I claim some serious knowledge in this area. My partner and I have extensive experience of American B&Bs. I should probably say that we acquired it before we had children, and also before we had Trump, when America was still somewhere you wanted to visit. But over several ­summers, we B&B’d in places as far apart as Boston and San Francisco, with Denver in between, and from Santa Fe to Boseman, Montana. And we learned, as English travellers quickly do, that the American B&B is on another level from the nylon sheets and scowling landladies evoked by the term in our own culture.

Typically, upon your arrival at their picket-fenced suburban property, your hosts, normally called Denny and Rita, would extend you the warmest of welcomes, sometimes including hugging. No item of furniture anywhere on the premises would be without some kind of lace doily somewhere about its frame. Your bed was likely to be canopied, and occasionally occupied by soft toys. Breakfast would be around a communal table with the other guests and would invariably feature home-baked carrot muffins and “Denny’s own special flummery”. And whatever your plans for the day, Denny and Rita would urgently encourage you to be back by 4pm for the afternoon cheese and wine which they would lay out on the sideboard in the lounge.

We loved it. Moreover, we agreed that, with the possible exception of the flummery, the baked-that-morning breakfast goods, the lace doilies, the canopied bed, the soft toys, the afternoon cheese and wine on the sideboard, the enforced eating with strangers and the insistent presence of Denny and Rita, this was truly as “home from home” as a hotel stay could be.

And, bafflingly, Tuchel, despite the opportunity handed to him on a rose-patterned plate, has passed it up in favour of a comparatively thin imitation of the “home from home” experience for his players at the Inn at Meadowbrook.

Ah well. Maybe next time they’ll talk to me first. And I suppose the lake in the grounds there looks quite nice. Though very flat, obviously.

Photograph by Brittany Schauer Photography/Getty Images