Here we are then, at the gates of North America, 26 Englishmen tasked with winning a football tournament on 19 July. Cue two months of febrile debate, anxiety and at the end of it all, well, you know.
Failure to repeat the World Cup success of 1966 has become such a feature of Englishness that you wonder why Thomas Tuchel is even bothering to name a squad. The subject is worthy of its own sociological canon, given its wide-ranging exploration and the complexity assumed.
The latest expression of this phenomenon can be heard in David Baddiel’s podcast Sixty Years of Hurt. It would, perhaps, be best were Baddiel’s treatment of the subject scratched from Tuchel’s pre-World Cup playlist lest he, too, becomes contaminated by the same doom-loop fatalism that keeps the hurt-ball rolling.
Tuchel’s job is to imbue his final 26 with the kind of Germanic hauteur that has yielded four World Cups and three European Championships, check all negative associations at departures and somehow touch down in Kansas City unencumbered by leonine bullshit. The winning formula might be less about personnel and more about just keeping the lads fit and happy, plenty of Fifa, box sets, darts, pool, golf and headers in the pool.
