It’s hard to gauge Tuchel’s England so far. Partly because England have a great group of players and a strong qualifying record recently (in results even if the performances haven’t always been thrilling) but also because England at home against teams who know they’ll be up against it and come setup to frustrate will always look a bit like this.
I think these two games were a bit more exciting than a lot of the latter era Southgate fare but Tuchel wasn’t hired to win these games. We were winning them anyway. He’s been hired to get England over the line in late stage knockout tournament football and we won’t know what that looks like until we’re there.
And therein lies the problem.
Apart from tournament finals, there are few
opportunities to competitively go "toe to toe"
against the good national teams.
Rugby used to have this problem.
The north hemisphere nations rarely played
their south counterparts, and the gulf in
ability was often really big.
Nowadays the nations play each other yearly,
so the north began to raise their game to
the point where they could be peers or betters
to the south.
IMHO the key data analytics you will be able
to study for the Tuchel era are the :
1. scale of the wins over the lesser teams
2. clinical rate (goals scored / attempts on goal)
3. perceived difficulty of each attempt scored
#1 is a good general measure of dealing with busparquet.
#2 / #3 is for assessing what happens when you
play the good teams (who will present you with
higher difficulty / fewer scoring opportunities) .
