Thomas Tuchel’s otherwise forgettable second win at least brought some memorable firsts. Both Reece James and Eberechi Eze opened their international goalscoring accounts, to secure a 3-0 win over Latvia.
In between, Harry Kane of course got his 71st goal, but this didn’t quite become the stat-padding some might have expected.
Latvia didn’t let it. They made England really work for any opening, which in turn made James’s goal all the more valuable. On a night of frustrating imprecision, he offered a goal of soaringly exquisite accuracy. The free-kick, brilliantly curled right into the top corner, was some way to hit your first England strike. It was also emotional reward for the 25-year-old after a long period of injury troubles, that Tuchel should feel rewards the manager’s own willingness to play his former Chelsea defender. This is why he has always loved James as a player.
It’s dubious as to whether Tuchel got much else out of the night, Eze’s first goal notwithstanding. The new manager might instead be realising just how thankless a lot of international football can be.
None of this is to criticise Tuchel. His team did try to turn it on and there were a few flourishes. It’s just the nature of the level for the major countries. At this point in international football history, and especially with the expansion of tournaments, they are really waiting two years for answers to long-asked questions.
It is why, even though England are expected to cruise through qualifying with very little tension to the actual games, there is a different tension to the overall campaign. Tuchel has to develop a system that works in a tournament but perfect it against opposition that isn’t really good enough to get close to a tournament. Hence 2025 is likely to be filled with matches against approaches that aren’t so much “low block” as subterranean block, only for the 2026 knockout rounds to bring a completely different type of test.
It does make the manager’s own adjustment from the club game to international football that bit more complicated.
England could end up honing approaches that aren’t quite suited to the most exacting levels next summer. Really, games against Serbia – their main competition for top spot – can’t come soon enough.
Take one of the main features of this game, which is Tuchel’s necessary experimentation with midfield. The area ended up being the Gareth Southgate era’s defining problem, as England ultimately lost all of their key games to teams who had decisive control over that area.
The post-mortems were usually of the same nature, that there was no equivalent to Luka Modric in 2018, to Marco Verratti in 2021, to Rodri or Martin Zubimendi in 2024. The absence of such a player was amplified by the rigidity of Southgate’s system, where the relative lack of fluid movement meant gaps couldn’t be covered in the same way.
Tuchel hasn’t quite sought to evade that problem but instead to ensure the midfield is rarely in the same configuration or even the same place. So, although Declan Rice and Jude Bellingham notionally started as the “two” on the team sheet, Myles Lewis-Skelly was frequently in that area when England were in position, while Bellingham regularly rotated with Morgan Rogers.
It’s good to develop that, but the question is how valuable a test this was. If England unwillingly lack that midfield controller, Latvia willingly lacked a midfield. They had almost everyone back in the box for long periods.
As such, the manager won’t be much wiser as to whether this can properly work against a midfield like Spain’s. Latvia here made them work in a different way. There were often a forest of bodies in their box, right up to the end.
A general angst to the earlier part of the night could maybe be witnessed in Bellingham’s second-half foul, for which he was fortunate not to receive a second booking. By then, at least, James’s free-kick had ensured victory. Marcus Rashford meanwhile continued to show progress, while Rogers had a lively performance.
It gradually wore Latvia down, which is the other side to approaches like theirs. Fatigue sets in, more openings appear, and then Rice can run right through to just drill the ball across for Kane. Even the number of Latvian bodies in the box became a hindrance for them, as they ended up just deflecting in strikes like Eze’s.
England kept going, which is pretty much all Tuchel can do. He’s worked out some potential solutions, without fully knowing what the questions will be.
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