The beer cups are not yet being hurled. Tabloid editors have not yet decided which root vegetable would Photoshop best onto his face. Helicopters are not yet being despatched to take aerial shots of his house. We are still probably at least two defeats away from our first World War Two-themed front page.
But perhaps in hindsight, this was the week Thomas Tuchel finally became the England manager. The night he finally felt the weight of the hairshirt. Finally glimpsed the depth and darkness of a job in which all defeats are humiliations, where the default temperature is set permanently to “scorn”, where every decision is a betrayal of somebody, somewhere.
And, you know, fair enough. Ahead of this camp you would probably have got pretty long odds on England emerging from games against Andorra and Senegal with a negative goal difference. England have neither attacked well nor defended well, and indeed have looked for the most part exactly what they are: a group of exhausted talents sapped by a long season in the most physically demanding league on the planet.
Trevoh Chalobah and Levi Colwill were a weird choice of centre-half pairing given both are still trying to pace themselves for a gruelling Club World Cup campaign. Kyle Walker had seemingly prepared for an 8pm rather than a 7.45pm kick-off. Bukayo Saka did four-fifths of very little. Conor Gallagher skittered around like a puppy at Sunday lunch: darting in between legs, knocking things over, eternally sniffing something out, but largely at a loss as to what.
And so can we really have learned anything from a game that kicked off five minutes late, where the vibe was so end-of-term you half-expected to see people signing each other’s shirts with felt-tip pens? Well, perhaps we did. Amid the loose ends and loose passes, we were treated to Eberechi Eze’s best game in an England shirt.
That Eze got 90 minutes – for the first time in his 11 caps – was a statement in itself. As Tuchel rolled through his substitutions, Eze kept glancing over to the touchline, half-expecting to see his number. Harry Kane and Anthony Gordon went off. Gallagher went off. Saka and Declan Rice went off. Finally in the 88th minute, Ivan Toney lurked at the side of the pitch. The board went up. It was Myles Lewis-Skelly.
Why did Tuchel want to see more of Eze? Why does he refer to Eze as “Ebs” and Morgan Gibbs-White as “Morgan Gibbs-White”? As Kane came off and England went strikerless for the first time since the disastrous home defeat against Greece in October 2024, we got our answer. Unleashed in a mobile central role, Eze – flanked by Gibbs-White and Morgan Rogers – was at the heart of England’s best period of the match.
Already there had been some promising glimpses. England began with a kind of box midfield in possession, Kane and Eze both offering themselves to receive while the two wingers stayed high and stretched the pitch. Out of possession it was Eze who led the press alongside Kane, Eze who won the ball from Lamine Camara for England’s opening goal.
But it was after the hour that Eze truly came alive. Within seconds of going up top he was bringing down a long ball and playing a frankly ridiculous backheel to Gibbs-White. A few minutes later, with England now 2-1 down, he did it again, and Gibbs-White should have done better with the shot. Later a low cross across the penalty area begged for a touch.
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Already it is clear that Tuchel sees Eze as more of a No 10 than a wide option, perhaps even an alternative No 9 in Kane’s absence. His main competition is probably Cole Palmer, another player who seemed to be running on fumes against Andorra at the weekend. Palmer is probably the superior short passer, the superior creator, the superior set-piece taker. Eze, for his part, is a more assiduous off-the-ball presence, a more versatile player, a faster and more direct runner.
Either way, this is not as simple a call as it might have been six months ago. For Eze has one more asset in his favour: the wind at his back and the confidence of his coach. His first England goal against Latvia seems to have stirred him to a new level, a stunning late-season run of form that earned him seven goals in six games, the winner in an FA Cup final, and a first European campaign next season if Crystal Palace can somehow navigate Uefa’s dual ownership rules.
Clearly the noise will abate. Senegal and Nottingham will feel like ancient history by the time Tuchel assembles his players for their next camp. But if Eze ends up playing a pivotal role in England’s World Cup side, Tuchel may just reflect that a night of boos and incoherence was not entirely in a lost cause.
