The FA should have given the England job to Lee Carsley but they bottled it and lurched back to star-gazing, swooning and short-termism, writes OLIVER HOLT

The FA’s CEO, Mark Bullingham, was first out of the blocks with his tribute to Lee Carsley after Carsley’s final game in interim charge of England on Sunday night.

The statement came a few minutes after the end of England’s 5-0 rout of the Republic of Ireland. In fact, Carsley’s blood was barely dry by the time the statement was released.

Bullingham thanked Carsley for his ‘hard work and results’. He observed Carsley had selected some ‘exciting new players’ in his six games in temporary charge.

And he said that Carsley would be providing Thomas Tuchel and assistant Anthony Barry with ‘a very detailed handover’ to aid them in England’s World Cup qualifying campaign.

And that was it. A little bit of damage limitation from English football’s governing body. An attempt to gloss over a failure of nerve. Thank you and goodnight.

None of it could disguise the fact that the FA failed the English game spectacularly with the way it has handled the succession to Gareth Southgate as permanent England boss.

They should have given the job to Carsley, who had done everything possible to justify being promoted from his position as Under-21s boss by winning the age-group European Championships last year.

It is a template that has worked flawlessly for Spain and for Argentina but when it came to the crunch, the FA simply did not have the faith or the conviction to see it through.

So they reverted to type. They did the lazy thing. They did what they thought was the safe thing. They went for a boss who would satisfy social media. They went for Tuchel.

They lurched back to the star-gazing, swooning, short-term decision-making process that once brought us Fabio Capello as a disastrous England manager.

And they took all the fine work they had done in backing Southgate and giving him the platform to transform England’s fortunes and they threw it out of the window.

Tuchel is an excellent manager and an intelligent man. And it may be that he enjoys great success with England. Let’s face it, he ought to after what has been bequeathed him.

But he is not a surefire bet. No one is. His most recent managerial reference was becoming the first manager of Bayern Munich to fail to win a trophy for more than a decade.

He is bright and challenging and clever and tactically astute but he also has a habit of falling out with people, which could be a problem in a job which needs plenty of diplomacy.

Tuchel’s temperament may soon become an issue when Pep Guardiola or Mikel Arteta or Unai Emery or Eddie Howe tells him a player is unavailable to England through injury.

However good Tuchel may turn out to be, the galling and dispiriting thing is that the FA had the answer under their noses the whole time.

They had done all the hard work. They had established a pathway for home-grown coaching talent to emerge and thrive at a high level.

They had begun to build a system and a line of succession that would encourage young English coaches to see a way forward.

They had started to act like a nation with a well thought-out, coherent plan again. Then they lurched in the other direction.

They had groomed Carsley for the top job and he had repaid them with great success with the Under-21s.

And then, at the crucial moment, just when it seemed right for Carsley to take the permanent job after Southgate’s race was run in the summer, the FA blew it.

They have let English coaches lay the foundations for a crack at the biggest prize of all in international football and then handed the responsibility for putting the finishing touch to it to Tuchel.

Even in the six games he was in charge of the senior team, Carsley provided ample evidence that he should have been the man trusted with taking England forward to the 2026 World Cup.

I am not making that argument because England won 5-0 against an Ireland team who were ordinary and limited even before they were reduced to 10 men early in the second half at Wembley.

I am making it because Carsley demonstrated he had the courage and the acumen to make the hard decisions that would help England to evolve into a tournament-winning team over the next 18 months.

Carsley knows the brilliant group of young England players pushing through from the Under-21s better than anyone and he demonstrated that by his bold but judicious use of them in the last two months.

He also had the courage to confront the issue of captain Harry Kane’s standing in the England side and the idea that he may no longer be a prime asset by the summer of 2026.

Kane had been an untouchable under Southgate but Carsley changed that when he left him out of the starting line-up in Greece last week.

He gave Ollie Watkins a chance instead and Watkins took it. And in the process, the debate about whether England need a more mobile centre forward, a centre forward who will not drop into the space occupied by a No 10 such as Jude Bellingham or Cole Palmer, has gathered pace.

It will be interesting to see whether Tuchel, who established a close working relationship with Kane at Bayern, will be as unencumbered by the weight of history and reputation as Carsley was.

Tuchel has hard acts to follow. Both in Southgate, who was England’s most successful manager since Sir Alf Ramsey and created a new positive culture around the national side, and now in Carsley.

Jude Bellingham, England’s best and most important player, looked like a man rejuvenated when Carsley trusted him as England’s No 10. His quality shone through as brightly as ever. Other players have been queuing up to say how much they loved playing for Carsley.

Carsley was exactly what England needed at this stage: someone to guide a wonderfully talented group with a light hand. Not a personality manager who will try to stamp his individuality on the team. Not someone who wants to make it about him.

Under Carsley, England have taken the step forward they needed to take after the departure of Southgate. They have regained the momentum they were in danger of losing.

It beggars belief, frankly, that an organisation such as the FA, which is supposed to have the best interests of the national game at heart, should have ushered him back to the Under-21s.

Like every England supporter, I hope Tuchel is a roaring success and that England gets the absolute best version of him as a coach. I hope he leads the country to victory in the World Cup Final in New Jersey in the summer of 2026. What a ride that would be, a life’s ambition fulfilled for every England fan.

And I hope there are no regrets over what the FA did this autumn. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That is what they say. But the FA fixed it. Or they tried to. And now we will find out whether they have broken something instead.

Bentancur’s ban is harsh… but fair 

Tottenham midfielder Rodrigo Bentancur was given a seven-match domestic ban by the FA on Monday for using a racial slur about team-mate Son Heung-min. The ban seems a little harsh on Spurs but it is also fair. 

And anyway, harsh is what football needs at the moment as incidents of racial abuse rise. It is time the game started meting out punishments that act as a deterrent. 

It is certainly far preferable to how the game treated Enzo Fernandez after he was filmed chanting racist and homophobic slurs about the France team while on international duty with Argentina last summer. 

That fell outside the FA’s jurisdiction so no blame can be attached to them for the lack of subsequent sanction visited upon Fernandez. Chelsea’s response, however, was more troubling.

Instead of throwing the book at him, he was made captain.

My lucky escape 

I mentioned last week I was going to get up in the middle of the night to watch the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight on Netflix. I failed.

I set an alarm but I slept through it. From everything I have read, it sounds as if I had a lucky escape.