Ibrahimovic singles out England star who 'struggled' against DR Congo

Thomas Tuchel's flawed England squad construction is threatening their World Cup chances

As they schlep their way through a World Cup campaign that had started in such exemplary fashion, England are learning a lesson that many of their head coach's previous employers would have been happy to share for them. For all the many qualities of Thomas Tuchel, the head coach, not all of which were shining through in the 2-1 win over DR Congo, Tuchel the squad builder is not such a slam dunk.

That is something of a problem when your team, unlike all the others, does not have any checks and balances on how your roster is constructed because, well, it's international management. They stopped doing the whole selection by committee thing back in the 1960s. Your team, your rules, your problem when it goes wrong. And it really did come close to going very dramatically wrong in a way that would have surely have gone down as a failing of Tuchel.

It was not that Djed Spence, seemingly England's fifth-choice right back, was necessarily at fault for Brian Cipenga's opener. It was that it seemed inevitable the fault would come in that spot, where so much has been gambled on the fitness of Reece James. For years, Tuchel has been warning that tournament football is different, that one mistake can derail a promising campaign. You can almost see in his mind's eye that moment Trent Alexander-Arnold switched off in the 2022 Champions League final and Vinicius Junior beat Liverpool at the back post.

It is innate within Tuchel that he looks to mitigate against such risks. It is what makes him such an outstanding coach in knockout football, that he can grasp hold of a Chelsea side who seem to be going nowhere fast and turn them for a fleeting moment into one of the greatest defensive outfits European club football had seen for a generation. At their best, his teams see every risk coming a mile off. How then, could this manager respond to James suffering a hamstring injury by saying "no-one could see that coming." The sad reality of James' recent career is you could set your watch by his body failing him.

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Even now, after they survived such an almighty scare, the squad which he announced a month ago and has had an opportunity to hone since threatens to be Tuchel's folly. The 52-year-old has left him overstocked in positions he is not using, scrabbling around for what he can get elsewhere, all while having only afforded himself few players who might really shake up his side.

Right back is the immediate crisis because, of course, he should have readied himself for a James injury. If Tino Livramento or Ben White had made it to June 17 in one piece, then perhaps it would have been justifiable to eschew the talents of Alexander-Arnold, which are numerous and dramatically raise a team's ceiling but are best expressed in a way that requires covering from others. When neither of those two were available, it seemed obvious that Real Madrid's right back would be a better choice than a repurposed Bayer Leverkusen center back or a Tottenham utility guy.

There are positions where there is not that much sense worrying about your cover. If Declan Rice goes down in the knockout stages England are in such deep trouble that it does not really matter who you have backing him up. Jordan Henderson is, by all accounts, a good tourist. Why not go for him? The same might also be true of Dan Burn, another well-regarded member of the camp, but after Trevoh Chalobah was called up to replace Livramento, England find themselves with six options at center back when fully fit and yet so pressed at right back that they're having to shuffle Rice out there at the death against DR Congo.

Bringing three strikers made sense if one of them was to be Ivan Toney, the archetypal big man to cause chaos in the mixer when nothing else would break down a low block. Perhaps the Al-Ahli striker would have been the next man up if Kane hadn't turned the tide with 15 minutes to go. Still, England have had three games where they have had work to do prising apart an opponent in the second half, Toney has played no minutes and Ollie Watkins only six as Kane's replacement when Panama were beaten.

This isn't even solving for problems that haven't presented themselves yet. Tuchel has given himself options; he just has not used them. Meanwhile, four wide options look one too few when Bukayo Saka is not being selected to play three games in eight days. Was the trio of Anthony Gordon, Noni Madueke and Marcus Rashford a little too one-note? These were wingers selected for when space opens up against more ball-dominant opponents but perhaps not with enough consideration as to who was going to find the gaps in the opponents earlier in the tournament.

This lopsided squad has the air of the head coach who went to war with the Bayern Munich hierarchy because they would not bequeath a Joao Palhinha on him, who insisted that Paris Saint-Germain furnish him with Julian Weigl and who convinced himself that Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang would get Chelsea firing days before he himself was fired. England's is a squad that, with the possible exception of Toney, is built to Tuchel's specifications. His defenders ought to be more versatile and agile than they are showing, his midfield prizes strength and verticality over elan and his attackers suit Harry Kane.

There was logic in that approach, certainly more than Gareth Southgate's 11th-hour conviction that it was the job of the England manager to jam the maximum number of club superstars on the pitch at any one time. It is just an approach that, in retrospect, has been taken to an extreme. When there is space for three outfield players, why not give yourself insurance for your relatively injury-prone player and add a few profiles that you would not naturally gravitate towards?

Even in this most trying of triumphs, there was a case to be made for Tuchel the coach. When he got his hands on his players at the hydration breaks, what followed was an immediate and pronounced uptick in performance. Playing Rice as a quasi-right back with a real license to bomb on was a shrewd move, one vindicated as he made an out-of-in run to the byline that allowed him to deliver the cross before the cross from which Kane nodded home the equalizer.

Tuchel, the coach, has such a track record of excellence in knockout games that he can be trusted to work around constraints that emerge on the pitch and off it as well as anyone. It is just a pity for England that so many of the binds their manager found himself in were those he made for himself.