Jake

The whole DNA thing from Tuchel clinches it for me: it's the story we tell ourselves that no England team can play like Spain (who of course didn't play "like Spain" for many years) and it simply isn't true: the 1990 England team, for example, had the most attacking quality on the ball in midfield of all the teams in that tournament - Gascoigne, Beardsley, Waddle - but we lost through bad luck - a deflection - and penalties. And then the story gets told and re-told, that England fail on the highest stage, or "we can't play possession football," and the self-consciousness around that poisons things at the root. At some level many England managers, and Tuchel absolutely, think as a first principle that English players aren't touch/possession players - so create a squad to cope with that, ignoring or benching the players who are or might be those sort of players, because they don't fit the team model that comes with that cope - and then the team aren't good enough on the highest stage, yeah, because that first principle is wrong.