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Football moved on quickly from watching Thomas Tuchel’s England laboured win over Andorra, and defeat to Senegal with Lee Carsley’s u21’s emerging victorious from the European Championships.

The victory returns Carsley to his previous position he held under the Gareth Southgate regime of haunting the England Manager with the prospect of something different to the stolid Senior XI who struggle under the German’s management. The promise of Carsley – that he will enthuse the side with youthful enthusiasm – ignored the reality of an England team which already relies on.

Tuchel’s side show players who featured – or could feature – in Carsley set up in the time since the u21 manager returned to his role following his games in charge of the Senior side. James Trafford, Myles Lewis-Skelly, Levi Colwill, Jude Bellingham, Morgan Rogers, Cole Palmer, Noni Madueke, Bukayo Saka from Tuchel’s squad suggest that it is not the Carsley burst of youth which is missing.

Challenges

That Tuchel seems to have fallen so quickly into the profile set by previous manager Sir Gareth Southgate says much about the challenges of the roles he has. The Andorra game, all dogged defence and Curtis Jones attempting to reinvent the role of full back, is an object lesson that no team especially are keen to provide the England side with a training exercise.

That Andorra, or Senegal, or recalling the last summer Slovakia and Slovenia, see playing England as an opportunity to follow their own agenda should not be surprising but always seems to be. Southgate believed that England should meet the attritional game of football with attritional performances, and that ultimately their quality would show.

Tuchel’s team try to overwhelm the opposition with tight passing moves, which seems misguided to say the least. Given that Tuchel’s approach to Andorra was to try play the ball around them in the final third, and that the best defence against that is to close space with as many people as can be mustered, then the manager plays very much to the strength of the opposition. Quantity becomes a quality and so players are left on the wrong side of Andorras who just need to be there.

Unimpressive

So England run lines of impressive attacking midfielders standing behind largely unimpressive defensive midfield lines and nothing much happens. One is tempted to worry that had the Rogers, Palmer, and Madueke line come back to get the ball deeper on the field, then the result would have been much the same, but it seems that England managers always need to discover that when players need space to play in in the last third the solution is not to add more and more attacking midfield area who have the remit to break into the box.

This was the lesson which Carsley found out during his time in charge of the Seniors, and the one which Tuchel is learning now, and one suspects that the process for both managers ends in them moving into the Southgate way of thinking that attritional football is not only respectful of an opposition’s willingness to play in the way they find best for them, but also practically the best solution.

The worry though is the respect shown for Tuchel by those players who are on the wrong side of a defensive line. Either they do not think enough of the manager that they will provide movement and create space for other to exploit, which is clearly the aim of the system, or they think so much of him that they believe that they have nothing to do other than follow basic instructions.

Neither bode well.