Harry Kane’s goal just before half-time secured a 1-0 win over New Zealand in Tampa, but the result was overshadowed by Thomas Tuchel’s pointed criticism of England’s first-half performance. The head coach described his side’s display as “too much freestyle” and said it was “not part of our training in the last four days.”
“I’m OK with it,” Tuchel said. “I’m not super-happy about it. I like the second half more than the first half. We played more from our positions and that’s why we played with more speed and off the ball we played with a bit more bite. The first half we were out of positions and it was a bit too much freestyle. That slowed our game down and made it difficult for the counterpress because we were not in the positions that we wanted to be when we started attacking. That’s basically the story of the match.”
“Thomas Tuchel unhappy with England’s ‘freestyle’ first half despite 1-0 win over New Zealand.”
The German explained that his “freestyling” comment mainly related to positional awareness. “We were lacking width so players were coming inside and narrowing ourselves down and slowing ourselves down and changing positions for too long,” he said. “We were taking crosses, a lot of long-range shots, normally not our style of play. We played a lot of long balls, we played a lot of long passes. That was not part of training in the last four days.”
There were other factors behind England’s lack of flow. They fielded different XIs in each half, the pitch was awkward and the heat was difficult to master. “We had one training in the sun and now this match felt really, really odd,” Tuchel said. “But it’s good that we’re exposed because that’s why we’re here. We wanted it that way and we need to get used to it because it will come at some point.”
Jude Bellingham was handed the captain’s armband after replacing Morgan Rogers at half-time and the Real Madrid midfielder pressed his case to start in the No 10 role when England open their campaign against Croatia on 17 June. “Jude has the decisiveness and he has the bite,” Tuchel said. “This is a key characteristic. You can see that he comes back from an injury…”