Of all the many and varied questions asked of Thomas Tuchel during this World Cup, one has become rather repetitive.‘Thomas, how is Declan Rice?’Rice, fundamental to England’s chances against Norway on Saturday, arrived in America carrying an injury to his lower back and hamstring and continues to nurse it through the biggest summer of his life, just as he nursed it through the back end of the biggest domestic season of his life.It’s not an injury as such. It’s pain caused by a nerve, caused by over-playing. Treatment can’t cure it. Only rest can. But you don’t get that in English football, a landscape not exactly potted with easy games.The Premier League is not Serie A or Ligue 1 or even the Bundesliga. It doesn’t allow big players an opportunity to take their foot off the pedal or be rested occasionally. It doesn’t have a winter break.So players such as Rice – as willing and selfless as you will ever find – push their bodies through various levels of pain and discomfort until somebody tells them they can stop. Rice has not reached that point yet. Harry Kane (left) and Jude Bellingham (right) have lit up the World Cup with England Declan Rice, meanwhile, looks exhausted after a punishing season with Arsenal that has left him nursing nerve painIf he is lucky, starting this weekend in a Miami melting pot, he still has nine days and three big games to go.Here in America we have seen Rice sitting on the bench with an ice pack on his leg after the DR Congo game. The previous match, against Panama, he sat out. On Wednesday back at the team base in Kansas City, he didn’t train with the rest of the squad. Tuchel has talked of him playing in almost unbearable discomfort. At times he has been a portrait etched in pain.So what we know is that the curse of the English domestic season remains. Every England manager for as long as we can remember has talked about it. It’s a burden.Gareth Southgate observed our bungled attempts to insert an international break into the schedule a few years ago with a mixture of bemusement and disdain.Tuchel, his successor, hasn’t even attempted to go there.‘What is the point in talking about it?’ he replied when asked about it by Daily Mail Sport last season.‘The situation is not going to change.’England players have on the whole not lacked stamina or endurance at this World Cup. The way Tuchel’s 10 men repelled Mexico in the final 20 minutes to win at the altitudinous Azteca last Sunday showed us that.