Are England football coaches all raving mad?

Correction: Thomas Tuchel really is the Andy Burnham of football after all. Overhyped as the harbinger of ‘change’, he has turned out to be as bad as his predecessor – and arguably even worse.

Long ago and far away (ie, last week), in that moment of hopeless hope for England in the World Cup, I wrote that, while dullard, safety-first-and-last England coach Gareth Southgate had been ‘the Keir Starmer of football’, his successor Tuchel was different.

Unlike Southgate, Tuchel appeared prepared to go for the kill and go down fighting; as he told the players before they went on the attack against Croatia in the first group game, if England lose, then ‘we lose playing our way’. Hence, I and others accepted that the German was something more than a Burnham-style cosmetic replacement.

A week is a long time in football, and we now know how wrong and naive we were. England did indeed lose the semi-final against Argentina ‘playing our way’. The problem is it was the same spineless, soul-crushing way that Southgate’s England lost the 2018 World Cup semi-final to Croatia, and the Euro 2020 final against Italy.

We go a goal up – and then just give up the ball to the opposition and hope we can hang on. Which we can’t. If the definition of insanity really is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then England football coaches must all be stark, raving mad.

When the bilingual Tuchel responded to Anthony Gordon’s 55th-minute goal by taking off attacking players – including the goalscorer – sending on defenders, and camping on the edge of our own penalty area, the writing was on the wall in whichever language you like.

Lionel Messi may not be the player he was; at 39 he seems to be playing the elderly gents’ game ‘walking football’ much of the time. But the little Argentinian maestro is still quite capable of unlocking a static defence, as if he was practising crossing over a line of training ground dummies. Tuchel sent on the big, lummox-like England defenders to deal with the crosses; Argentina scored the winner with a free header. Adios, Ingleses.

Professional pundits and fan TikTokers alike were understandably shocked and furious with Tuchel’s tactics. Yet in hindsight it all seems so predictable. As the brilliant Martin Samuel wrote in The Times: ‘The disease remains and is as contagious as ever. Different group, fancy new boss, same dispiriting outcome. When it matters, for all the character, for all the chemistry, there is still a lack of conviction.’ And experience teaches us that it is an English disease, not an alien German infection of the body football.

Yes the Argentinians were a bit dirty, though hardly in the league of their predecessors, whom Alf Ramsey dubbed ‘animals’ after the 1966 World Cup quarter final. (By coincidence, the Argie captain on that day, the talented but thuggish Antonio Rattín, who was sent off but famously refused to leave the pitch until a translator was brought on to explain, an incident which led to the introduction of red and yellow cards, died this week.)

Yet for all the Argentine fouls and insults, for all Messi’s residual magic tricks, the conviction remains that England could and probably should have won. But like Southgate before him, Tuchel bottled it and blew his historic opportunity.

This may well have been England’s best chance to get to and maybe even win a World Cup final. Instead the unspectacular Argentina will be there on Sunday; though Spain, excellent conquerors of France, must be favourites to spoil FIFA’s long-term wish to hand Messi the trophy as if it were a retirement gold clock.

The Argentina players caused more controversy at the end by parading a makeshift ‘Las Malvinas son Argentinas’ (‘The Falklands are Argentine’) banner on the pitch. Surely even the invertebrate Burnham wouldn’t swallow the global humiliation of surrendering sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, as Starmer did with the Chagos Islands sell-out. But then again, who knows? After all, their football equivalents have done their best to surrender any English claim to be a power in world football.

Mick Hume is a spiked columnist.