(personal underlines)
A German managing the England team? It’s depressing
Hand back the Falklands. Why not? FedEx over the Elgin Marbles. What’s the point of any of it anymore? They have put a German in charge of the England football team. It’s over.
Can there be a more depressing, or more obvious, sign of national decline than this utterly abject capitulation at the sport we love most – the game we invented, for God’s sake – to our greatest rivals? From Munich to Frankfurt to Hamburg they today must be howling at the appointment of Thomas Tuchel as England manager from the start of next year. The humiliation is searing.
Ignore if you want to the fact that appointing a foreign coach to any national team is very obviously cheating. By definition, a national team is a national effort. Everyone involved in it, from kit manufacturers to catering staff to players should, as a fundamental prerequisite, hail from the same land. But a German? Is nothing any longer sacred?
Yes, we had an Australian coaching the England cricket team for a bit. At the time, I thought things couldn’t get any worse than that. We also had the unlovable Eddie Jones, another Australian, coaching the England rugby team, and our rowing team between 1991 and 2020 was overseen by the German Jürgen Gröbler.
But this latest slap in the face, the appointment of Tuchel, hurts the most, not least because he’s so obviously brilliant. Dynamic, intelligent, charismatic – a proven winner – he’s everything Gareth Southgate wasn’t. No doubt on day one he will solve the impossible riddle and do what no England manager in my lifetime has seemed capable of doing: namely, picking our best players in their correct positions and getting them to win matches consistently.
How then we will all be impelled to applaud ze famous German know-how. What fun.
Yes, I know, we’ve had two exciting and hugely expensive experiments with foreign England football managers before, both a mistake. At the time of the appointment of Sven-Göran Eriksson in 2000, such was the approving fervour whipped up by our leading football and culture writers that to have gainsaid it would have been deemed the worst kind of little England-ism. The less said about the ludicrous Fabio Cappello, the better.
Can there be a more depressing, or more obvious, sign of national decline?
Neither won us a trophy, of course, and the likelihood is Tuchel won’t either. Since 1966, only one team managed by a foreign coach has secured either the World Cup or the European Championship: Greece in 2004 at the Euros under the German Otto Rehhagel, a result still regarded as one of the sport’s greatest ever flukes. This is a statistic you would have thought might have given the corporate droids at the Football Association pause before signing off the new manager’s £5 million annual salary.
There’s a very good line in one of my favourite films, Days of Thunder, in which the owner of a motor racing team played by Randy Quaid complains bitterly that with their antics his drivers have made the team look not merely ridiculous, but rather like ‘a monkey humping a football’.
For the longest time, this has been the image I have conjured every time the England football team has done something particularly idiotic: lose to Iceland, for example, or fail to appoint Harry Rednapp as manager, or omit Paul Gascoigne from the 1998 World Cup, or more recently leave out either Jack Grealish or Cole Palmer from the starting XI. I could go on and on. So could every England fan.
But at least the monkey humping the football – Eriksson and Capello notwithstanding – was our monkey. There was honour in that. Our mistakes were precisely that: ours. By drafting in some foreign wunderkind to change our fortunes, we effectively thumb our nose not just at the spirit of international competition, but also at all nations who cannot afford to do similar.
We’re behaving, in other words, like a corporate Goliath – one prepared unsmilingly to do whatever it takes to crush our rivals, no matter how grotesque or underhand. The appointment of the hugely likeable and capable Tuchel as our national team manager is then a day of great shame not just for English football, but also for England.
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