What can be said without fear of contradiction is that Thomas Tuchel is neither a ‘yes’ man, nor the kind of individual who says what he thinks the world wants to hear.
We discovered that during his time at Chelsea, when Roman Abramovich had been sanctioned by the British Government after his sponsor Vladimir Putin had ordered the invasion of Ukraine, leading some of the club’s fans to drown out a Ukraine tribute at Burnley.
Tuchel called that out as wrong. ‘It is not the moment to give other messages. It’s the moment to show respect,’ he said. He handled that period with class.
An assessment of his merits would include a knockout- football record which saw him take Paris Saint-Germain to a Champions League final — the only man to do so — and win the trophy with a modest Chelsea team.
Hard to feel anything but a heavy heart, though, at the prospect of Tuchel, a man described by his biographers, Daniel Meuren and Tobias Schachter, as the ‘Rulebreaker’ because of that wish to kick against orthodoxy and to throw the established plan up in the air. Their book details how Tuchel does not generally conform to the ‘culture’ of a place.
His tenure was brief at Dortmund, where he did not exactly embrace the club, Yellow Wall and all. And at Mainz he placed enormous emphasis on putting established professionals through endless passing drills.
He left, taking with him axioms like ‘It’s not the “what”, it’s the “how”’ and ‘the courage to be simple’. Nobody mourned.
So that might very well be it, then. No more of the ‘England DNA’. No more sense that England knows what it wants its national football to look and feel like, with St George’s Park — a Clairefontaine for this nation — as its cradle and cognitive core.
No Gareth Southgate working to make us feel that the team is our team, too. Just Tuchel, who managed Chelsea for 589 days and who generally rows with his bosses a lot, coming here to explain to us all about what courage looks like. Don’t worry. Thomas will know best.
The FA seemed to have courage in their plan eight years ago, when Southgate was tested out as manager and helped them appreciate that they did not have to hire the next expensive, out-of-work international boss off the rank.
They stumbled into it, of course. Had Sam Allardyce not been caught by an elementary British newspaper sting, Southgate might never have stepped up. But he provided a vision of English football and Englishness that we actually wanted to see. A football infused with young English players. A culture in which humility, curiosity, decency and likeability counted so much.
Something very significant Southgate said at the outset provided a hint, looking back now, of what he would bring.
We were in Dortmund, where Germany had beaten England 1-0 in his first match as permanent manager. The question of parochialism and triumphalism cropped up in the press conference, in relation to the English fans’ lunatic fringe singing about ‘the RAF from England’ shooting German bombers down.
‘We’re an island,’ Southgate said. ‘We’ve got to get off the island and learn from elsewhere, look in the mirror and change the way we do things tactically, with our physical preparation, our style of play and our mentality. Germany could teach us something about that.’
Here was an Englishman, schooled in the years of the national team’s near-misses and disappointments, expressing a wish to take the best he could from others and build with some of it. He didn’t know everything but he would do his best.
The notion of a panicked lurch in a new direction, the next England manager diametrically different to the last — Glenn Hoddle succeeded by Kevin Keegan; Fabio Capello by Roy Hodgson; Roy Hodgson by Allardyce — vanished into the mists of time. Until last night, when news of Tuchel’s imminent appointment felt like a return to the unpredictability of all our yesteryears.
A sudden stab in the dark. An appointment which would present deep uncertainty in many ways for England, the team’s image and what it represents. There will be rows, controversy, noise. Everything the FA had left far behind.
It’s not as if they have lacked time to decide on a successor. Southgate needed some persuasion to continue after the last World Cup and it was a near certainty that this summer’s Euros was the end of his road. The active pursuit of who was next should have started last winter and since Southgate had created something so sustaining, continuity had to be the prime objective.
It is not about an English manager at all costs. Pep Guardiola would have been an irresistible proposition, a name so stellar that his appointment would drown out all the angst and concerns about the need to recruit an Englishman, to preserve what makes international football different.
Though that’s not to be, there are others. Given Steve Cooper’s six years at the FA in various coaching capacities, winning the Under-17 World Cup in 2017 with a young England team that included Phil Foden, Marc Guehi, Conor Gallagher and Jadon
Sancho, his availability last December presented a six-month window to pursue him before Leicester City moved.
Graham Potter, a coach on a superb trajectory at Brighton before the Chelsea madhouse devoured him, has the intelligence to build on the structure and principles Southgate put in place.
Lee Carsley has not looked like an individual with the stature, communication skills or tactical prowess to manage England, these past 10 days, though he is an improvement on a lurch back to the old days of boom and bust.
Better an investment in all that has been built than a blind leap aboard the managerial gravy train for the best club boss who happens to be free.
The man who is expected to take up the position this week and who will tell us exactly how it’s going to be.
