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- Working with England and helping the side end their years of hurt will be a puzzle Tuchel relishes tackling
Thomas Tuchel made goals flow for Kylian Mbappe and Harry Kane. He created systems to coax consistency from the temperamental talents of Neymar, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Ousmane Dembele. He won the Champions League with Timo Werner up front.
Put it like that and it is easy to see why the FA have been seduced. Imagine what Tuchel’s tactical mastery might do with this wealth of creative English talent. Imagine the whirl of magnetic discs and felt-tipped arrows on white boards around St George’s Park as he goes in quest of the secret to elude all the others.
How to supply chances for Kane to finish. How to be secure at the back while doing so, while entertaining a demanding audience and then sharpening it all up against better teams in the business end of tournaments.
It is the puzzle Tuchel will relish tackling. He is not lacking in self-belief at this advanced stage of his impressive coaching career.
He was a disruptor in his early days, treading the path of Jurgen Klopp from Mainz to Borussia Dortmund under the influence of his coaching mentor Ralf Rangnick, another product of Germany’s high-energy gegenpressing revolution.
He always adored the tactical battles, building teams to be more effective than the sum of their parts and plotting schemes to exploit the weaknesses of opponents and rattle the elite.
Much was made of the ‘Rulebreaker’ video, a tactical presentation detailing his transformation of Mainz which had proved so irresistibly exciting for the web-dwelling hipsters and tactical nerds of 2012.
But he has evolved into an adaptable, problem-solver rather than a coach bound by devout philosophical principles, capable of moving between systems to suit the players he inherits and creating teams to flex from one shape into another within games.
At Chelsea, he forged success upon a back-three. The squad had been loaded this way since Antonio Conte’s days and for Tuchel it disguised the limitations of Thiago Silva and Jorginho, the brains of his team, key to the whole thing and yet vulnerable when defending large areas or exposed to extreme pace.
Tuchel is self-confessed fan of Pep Guardiola but made it clear he would not be trying to mimic his possession style. He did not want possession for the sake of it, he stressed, which made perfect sense with N’Golo Kante, arguably the finest ball-winning midfielder of his generation, flickering back into top form. His football in England was fast and aggressive.
Wing-backs Reece James and Ben Chilwell were integral, released to fly forward and Chelsea became most destructive on the counterattack, as they proved beating Real Madrid in the Champions League semis and Manchester City in the final, albeit helped that day by Guardiola baffling decision to omit both Rodri and Fernandinho.
Werner’s pace offered threat behind and opened spaces for Mason Mount and Kai Havertz to excel because they had the appreciation to drift between lines, adding numbers into midfield or the front line, changing the shape of the team where they saw fit.
Tuchel’s Paris Saint-Germain team was built on a back-four with Marquinhos given the licence to step from central defence into midfield, as John Stones has done successfully for Manchester City.
Tuchel adored Marquinhos, trusting him implicitly to read the game and understand when to flex the formation and organise this on the pitch. Evidence perhaps of striking the balance with elite players, trusting their intelligence and instinct and not overwhelming the plan with detail.
The Marquinhos factor enabled him to load four forwards into some domestic games although he usually settled for three in the Champions League, where he took to Neymar as a false nine, roaming about and dragging markers with him, creating spaces for Mbappe and Angel di Maria on the run from deeper.
PSG were as cohesive as they had been in this big-spending Qatari era. They reached their only Champions League final only to lose to Bayern Munich in 2020, the season delayed by the Covid pandemic.
At Dortmund, he developed a successful team with a back four to maximise the pace of Aubameyang, finished second and then adapted to a back-three to accommodate Dembele and won the German Cup.
This tactical flexibility is appealing in international football, at least to a point. There is no transfer market. The players are the players you have and it is about creating a platform for them to perform.
Tuchel teams are always solid base at the back. After his first 12 months at Stamford Bridge, Edouard Mendy won the award for the world’s best goalkeeper, letting in only 31 goals in 54 games and keeping 27 clean sheets for Chelsea.
If there is a blot on his resume it came in his most recent job at Bayern Munich, failing to win the Bundesliga last season but, as far as England are concerned, he made Kane more prolific than ever with 44 goals in 45 appearances.
This he did by surrounding Kane with the pace and mobility of Jamal Musiala, Leroy Sane and Kingsley Coman, which ought to be something he can recreate with the range of attacking options at his disposal.
The big questions will be how he strikes the balance to cover defensive frailties, and thin areas of the squad such as left-back and central midfield without the luxury of signings, with lots of thinking time and only the occasional training session.
