Tommy Martin: A dark day for England? Or for the rest of us?

How close have we come to disaster? Our own version of the Cuban Missile Crisis twice in the last four years. The finger has hovered over the Doomsday button, but the steady hand of Gareth saw us through.

It has been an article of faith that something in them would always prevent it, some trace of the old bumbling amateur ethos, some gentlemanly diffidence that would overcome them like a Hugh Grant romcom just when the big prize was in their grasp.

No matter how good a team they had, we could assure ourselves that something would come up, that a tragic flaw would reveal itself right at the death: penalties, a goalkeeping howler, the inability to stop spindly continental midfielders holding onto the ball for long periods of time.

To understand England, you must know that it is governed by the rules of the sitcom, its greatest cultural export, and one of those rules is that the characters must always be trapped. This time next year, Rodney, and all that.

Gareth Southgate was a classic British sitcom character, buttoned up and decent, trying to hold it together amid the slapstick and grotesque. The plot seemed to offer him the glimpse of glory, the prospect that with one bound he and England would be free. 

Instead, he gave us the perfect ending in Berlin this summer: dignified, miffed and forever stuck.

But they might have finally gone and done it this time, Rodders.

“A dark day for England,” read the back page splash in the Daily Mail, “Three Lions gamble on a GERMAN.” 

That’s right, a GERMAN. They put the word in capitals because newspaper typeface doesn’t have a font to register such a level of disgust. Radio Times listings, 9pm on BBC Two. Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr. Tuchel? 

Leonard Rossiter stars as a jingoistic Fleet Street hack whose world is turned upside down when a GERMAN is appointed England manager. First in a new series.

Back in the real world where it is not a Thursday evening in 1974, the appointment of Thomas Tuchel is a cause for alarm. There is a clarity here, a laser focus, the sense of getting down to brass tacks. To put it in militaristic terms the Daily Mail would appreciate, this is Operation Just Bloody Win Something Already.

They have been down this road before, of course, with Sven Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello. Sven was too cosy with the incipient English celebrity footballer class and Capello was too hostile to them.

It was those experiences — and England’s historic failures in general — that inspired the England DNA blueprint that the Football Association has spent the last decade at their St George’s Park headquarters investing in, finetuning, championing and, latterly, enjoying the fruits of. Southgate was its poster boy and the talent from which he got to choose his squad was proof positive of its merits. 

Add to that the clatter of trophies that England have won at all levels of the game. Apart from one.

Given the genealogy of their royal family, it’s not quite the outrage that some are making out for the FA to go German, even if there has been some unpleasantness between the two nations in the years since the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha changed its name to Windsor. 

For all its successes, that England’s DNA could throw up indigenous candidates no better than Messrs Howe, Potter and Carsley is a sign of the enduring weakness of the native bloodline.

Watching the Euros final and how England’s forklift-load of star power wobbled its way to defeat at the hands of the smarter, more co-ordinated Spaniards, you were reminded that their fatal flaw is that very absence of whatever footballing chromosome makes their rivals cohere and integrate as a team at the decisive moments in tournament football.

Alas, the tone of the debate about England’s failings in the summer never seemed to rise above personalities, selection calls and talk of handbrakes. 

It is instructive that Lee Carsley pulled Angel Gomes from Ligue 1 obscurity for his ability to string a few passes together, rather than anyone from the hurly-burly of the Premier League.

And so, to Tuchel, whose best moment was coming into the post-teenage house party wreckage of Frank Lampard’s Chelsea and putting everything shipshape just in time for Mr Abramovich coming through the front door. 

That 2021 Champions League victory came just five months after he was appointed Chelsea manager. It was precise, clean and clinical, a feat of pointing and arranging and cajoling entirely without overriding philosophy or lingering legacy. Just do that again, is what the FA have basically said, and to hell with the DNA.

“Mark (Bullingham, FA CEO) and John (McDermott, technical director) told me this job would just be about football,” he said in his introductory press conference, smoothly distancing himself from the Southgate portfolio which included matters such as Brexit, race relations and woke England shirt logos. The anthem question was long-fingered, Harry Kane showered in praise, links to Manchester United dismissed.

Tuchel’s sangfroid on greeting the English press pack must have been deeply unsettling for the Second World War revivalists in their midst, no doubt bringing to their minds visions of a charming but sinister Obergruppenfuhrer put in charge of the British province of a victorious Third Reich, insisting on his deep his admiration for the English as he holds their lives in his hands.

But saner minds in Blighty have prevailed, and the FA has seen with Sarina Wiegman and the women’s team what a brainy, single-minded foreigner can do when allied to the best of British. 

For those of us who have lived contentedly with England’s tournament limitations, it is a dark day indeed.