World Cup: Day 21
Ok, I cheated a bit. We’re covering these games in more of an order of significance, Match of the Day style, than straight chronological order. Me being me, I had more to say about England. Plenty of you are here to read about the USMNT. This is all very unfair to Belgium vs Senegal, which was clearly the best game of the day, but I’ve got a business to run here.
England 2-1 DR Congo
Thomas Tuchel is such a weird guy.
He can seem at times both totally flexible and utterly rigid. He’s someone who totally changed his ideas about how to play football from intense pressing and really attacking positional play at Mainz and Borussia Dortmund to something more calm and player-first in the second half of his career. He’s used lots of different systems and ideas. It’s hard to pin down what “Tuchelball” really looks like because he’s willing to adapt.
At the same time, once he decides on his idea for a group of players, he’s not changing. His system and approach with England has been basically unchanged from the first match in March 2025. The shape is a 4-2-3-1/4-3-3 hybrid. One full back stays deep to become a quasi-centre back, while the other moves into central midfield. The wingers stay very wide, even as they play on the opposite side to their stronger foot. Harry Kane drops deep and the most advanced midfielder (Jude Bellingham, except when it was Morgan Rogers) pushes up to make a sort of strike partnership. He could pick essentially any starting lineup and I’d still know the jobs everyone would be doing.
I don’t think it’s the wrong system. It’s probably the most logical use of England’s talent (save for one issue I have, which I will get to later). But it’s still frustrating how single-minded he can be.
DR Congo caught England with their pants down a little bit by starting with a 4-3-3 instead of the expected back five. Not every manager has to do a Tuchel about it. That’s what helps them score the first goal. They clearly targeted Djed Spence as the weak link here, doubling up on him and forcing him to make a choice. He loses the initial header he tries to win, so the ball floats out to Brian Cipenga who scores. This is the kind of situation where Reece James or Jarell Quansah might’ve just cleared the ball, but Spence isn’t as dominant in the air.
England looked a little shell-shocked after conceding. Tuchel was able to calm everyone down a bit during the first hydration break and things started happening from there. They were getting decent chances down the right flank, with Arthur Masuaku starting to struggle. DR Congo’s formation shape did expose them quite a bit more in wide areas. England got a decent amount of variation from players drifting out to wide spaces and putting in different types of crosses.
The issue I have with this shape in an attacking sense is that it doesn’t attack the half-spaces well enough. Bellingham can drift out there at times, but it’s not structurally set up to get players into that zone. I feel like that’s a part of why it can look static and disjointed. You have the wingers out there staying wide, then the central guys doing their thing, but it’s been hard to link the two. Declan Rice was useful drifting out wide, but that was more about him doing his own thing than bringing others into play. England don’t have a consistent pattern to link the wingers with Kane and Bellingham. I think that’s the missing piece. Right now, the wingers are a bolt-on rather than a core structural asset.
England got both goals late, but I think it was more about accumulation of chances, and those happened to be the ones that went in. The narrative obviously becomes about Kane. Once again, I actually thought he struggled until he was obviously brilliant. DR Congo openly admitted they copied their defensive structure from Ghana, and that sort of shape makes it harder for him. He can’t drop deep and play those balls in behind for runners when there isn’t the space. That worked brilliantly against Croatia, but in games like this, England need him to hold his position upfront. He’s also very low energy without the ball. England don’t press much at all because Kane jogs out of possession. But then he scores two goals and wins the game. He turns it on when it matters. Having him upfront can be a trade-off, but he’s clearly worth it.
England get through, with concerns. I don’t expect Mexico will approach the next game the way DR Congo did, so if England fail at the Estadio Azteca, we’ll probably be having different conversations. The intensity of the Mexican crowd probably pushes El Tri towards going for it a bit more than they might on neutral territory. I am very nervous about that game. I don’t know enough about the science of how altitude affects sporting performance to offer a serious opinion there, but it concerns me. Tuchel outright said that “it’s physically just not possible to adapt to the altitude”, making it “a huge advantage that Mexico will have”. We’ll have to see what happens on Sunday night (well, Monday morning in my time zone). For now, I’m putting it to the back of my mind for a few days. England are through and that’s what counts.
United States 2-0 Bosnia and Herzegovina
When it was good, it was very good.
