If you want fans to make a noise, stop going 3-0 up

You take a complaint like that in isolation and … well, you couldeasily assume that it could only have come from someone who doesn’t really know how football andfootball crowds work and has never put his head inside the door of astadium long enough to find out.

So, at the risk of coming across as unnecessarily patronising (certainly not the intention here by any means), let’s go back over some of the fundamentals, shall we, and see if we can demystify for Tuchel the performance of the England fans at that match on Thursday, and for anyone else similarly reckoning with their disappointment in this matter.

And let’s start with those ­supporters – “silent” in the second half, and from whom the team “deserved more”, according to Tuchel. Now, as ­customers who are uniquely charged with a performing role in the entertainment they are paying to see, football-goers as a rule tend to be fairly responsive to a sense of consequence. Therefore, if you are a manager who hopes to see your team benefit from the animatedly supportive backing of the attending audience (singing, chants, noise, etc, and for the whole of the 90 minutes), it certainly helps if the game you’re offering that audience has at least some competitive bearing likely to affect its mood.

In that context, then, we should straightaway note that the ­offending game against Wales took the form known widely in international ­football as “a friendly”. Now, there may be “no such thing as a friendly” as far as certain ferociously competitive professionals-turned-pundits are concerned. But there is every such thing as a friendly from the paying spectator’s point of view and a friendly is, I’m afraid, by definition a game you can’t care all that much about, on the grounds specifically that (as above) it lacks convincing ­consequences. Furthermore, if the friendly is against a far smaller side whom your own team would be expecting to beat (if England are ­playing Wales, for example) then all of the above is compounded.

Now, let’s move on to consider another key aspect of spectator engagement, namely “the state of play”. If you want to maintain an optimally boiling atmosphere – and you’re playing a team you’re expected to beat, in a friendly – your best move is almost certainly not to go 3-0 up within 20 minutes. Actually, that’s your very worst move – a guaranteed bucket of cold water for your desired cauldron. At that point, a contest which was already struggling to qualify as such is officially over and, because football fans are partial to black comedy, the only people you’re going to be hearing from for long stretches are the fans of the underdog.

“Why is the roof still on the ­stadium?” Tuchel wondered. Which may tempt analysts of this situation to consider the nature of Wembley itself – the building’s manifest architectural drawbacks, the way that the thoughtlessly arranged acoustics in the place turn all crowd noise to an uninvolving mush, and the ultimately undeniable fact that the country’s national stadium is an utterly brilliant place to watch Coldplay and an absolutely terrible place to watch football.

But we don’t need to get into that. The uncomplicated point is, if you’re playing a team you’re expected to beat, in a friendly, and you go 3-0 up inside 20 minutes, it wouldn’t really matter if you were in the Maracanã. You’ve just ticked all the essential boxes for in-ground ­atmosphere depletion and nowhere on Earth is going to save you from it.

You’ll see what you did there, Thomas, surely. That was two ­party-killing moves in one swoop. No party was ever coming back from that. There were options. You could have gone easier on them, picked a weaker team, introduced some ­jeopardy, made it matter. But you didn’t. It’s on you, sir, not the fans.

Photograph by James Gill - Danehouse/Getty Images