Maybe it’s the time of the year, or maybe it’s down to my sad little life, but surely I can’t be alone in feeling my spirits lifted by the example that Steve Borthwick and Thomas Tuchel are setting. The managers of England’s rugby and football teams have displayed courage, vision and a higher morality that could usefully be followed in other areas – politics, certainly, or business. Both came under fire in the early days of their management and stood resolutely firm. Model stuff surely.
What Tuchel has done with his England side is a proper lesson for life. He has decided on a course of action – picking the best team but not necessarily the best players – and is sticking to it, ignoring all the off-stage squeals and drama. And the results have so far borne him out spectacularly: eight games, eight wins and eight clean sheets. No other team in Europe (apart from one) in the World Cup qualifying rounds has come close to this. That team was Norway, by the way, and they do have Erling Haaland and the Arsenal captain Martin Odegaard, despite giving away five goals. Admittedly England’s group wasn’t the strongest but many of us remember when England couldn’t scrape a draw with Iceland, so let’s celebrate Tuchel and his sly Teutonic wit.
The acid test comes at the World Cup. Is this England squad the culmination of more than 30 years of the Premier League? The very best, able to hold its own with the world’s best? Well, Tuchel, who has a preposterously impressive CV featuring management jobs at Dortmund, Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea and Bayern Munich, certainly thinks so. He was given one job, to win the World Cup, and that’s what he has set out to do. And like Borthwick, he has had the sense to develop a squad where there is fierce competition for every position (something the England cricket team have failed to manage so far). And he isn’t going to be subordinate to any of the ‘big beasts’ of football or the media. Behaviour matters.
Like Borthwick, Tuchel has had the sense to develop a squad where there is fierce competition for every position
With five minutes to go in the dead rubber against Albania, Tuchel was preparing to replace Jude Bellingham, who was on a yellow card, with Villa’s Morgan Rogers. Real Madrid’s Bellingham, who is a very big beast and a superbly talented footballer, though not overburdened with self-doubt, started waving his arms when he saw he was about to be replaced. Tuchel wasn’t happy: ‘If you have players like Jude who are so competitive, they will never like it,’ he said. ‘But my word stands – we are about standards and a level of commitment and respect to each other. So we won’t change our decision just because someone is waving with their arms. Behaviour is key, and respect towards the team-mates who come in.’
Tuchel has said that Bellingham, Harry Kane and Phil Foden can’t play together. At last someone willing to point out that just because there are a ton of good players, they can’t all be in the same team – something that was painfully ignored in the era of Gerrard, Beckham, Lampard, Scholes and so on, who were shoehorned together to no real effect.
While Tuchel’s big test comes across the Atlantic next summer, Borthwick has longer to wait for the next rugby World Cup, in Australia in 2027. In the meantime, there’s the Six Nations. The two top teams should be England and France, and they play each other in the last game of the tournament in Paris on 14 March – something to clear the diary for.
Neither Tuchel nor Borthwick are shouty types: you can’t tell whether England are winning or losing by the look on Borthwick’s face during a game. Jason Leonard is reputed to have said of Borthwick, affectionately, that his defining characteristic is that he is very boring. Well if this is ‘boring’ let’s have more of it. Borthwick is an understated, unshowy man, highly intelligent and with a fantastic attention to detail.
His team are hugely successful, ten wins on the bounce, though they have yet to face the Springboks. They did manage to make the All Blacks look pretty ordinary last month, however, and maybe even more importantly, they have become a treat to watch. He has a fine balance between experience and youth: at 32, George Ford is the current fly-half, but the Smiths, Fin (23) and Marcus (26), are waiting to step in. The pack is ferocious but there are replacements all down the line. He is willing to let youth rip, not least in a headband, and he has recruited two of the finest coaches, Lee Blackett (attack) and Joe El-Abd (forwards).
Is it too soon to celebrate two great managers and two possible World Cup-winning teams? Well, of course it is, but hey, it’s Christmas. Season of goodwill and all that.
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