England head coach Thomas Tuchelplaceholder image
England head coach Thomas Tuchel | Getty Images
England deserved their win over Croatia - but did they show teams how to beat them in the process?
Given that the game against Croatia was expected to be England’s toughest test in the group stage, Wednesday’s 4-2 win will have gone a long way towards breeding confidence and settling nerves within their Kansas City training camp – but there certainly were a few nerves on display in Dallas.
England were imperious after half-time and the win will rightly encourage the English players and supporters but they were far from flawless, and the first half may have handed future opponents a blueprint for beating them. Croatia’s pressing, in particular, created altogether too many problems.
England beat Croatia – but played with fear at the back
Thomas Tuchel is a coach who wants his side to prioritise controlled possession and to play out from the back rather than launching long balls downfield. He criticised his players for the number of direct passes they attempted during the warm-up win over New Zealand, and clearly drilled his desire for patient build-up play into the squad before the game against Croatia. Following those instructions, however, was nearly their undoing.
Within three minutes of the kick-off, England had given the ball away four times under pressure in their own third. Croatia’s relentless and organised high press was too quick, too intense and too well-drilled for a back line which lacked the technical quality to handle it.
A pattern emerged whenever England got the ball around their own penalty area: They would try to pass the ball short through the middle, only to be forced to knock it right back where it came from. That compelled Jordan Pickford or the central defenders to play the ball wide to the full-back, who was instantly put under huge pressure and given no escape routes to work with.
The result was a series of high turnovers in dangerous areas, and England were exceptionally fortunate that they went unpunished. The goals they did concede were sloppy in other ways – Reece James, for instance, should know better than to have been suckered towards the ball before Petar Musa’s strike – but those were not mistakes one would expect to be repeated on a regular basis. The failure to handle the high press, however, felt endemic.
Time and again, England’s defenders took one too many touches, waited too long to play the next pass and failed to move into space to give their colleagues an out ball. They got away with it, but they also showed the rest of the teams they’ll face that they’re vulnerable to intensive pressure at the back.
After the match, Tuchel described the way they had played in the first half as “fearful,” a word also used by his assistant coach Anthony Barry during a half-time interview. Both criticised the team’s failure to find passing lanes and to play through gaps. The fear dissipated after half-time when England broke Croatia with a superb 15-minute spell of attacking football, but not before it had demonstrated a pronounced weakness which other sides may be able to exploit.
England have work to do to win the World Cup
The issue felt especially acute down the left flank. Nico O’Reilly looked edgy on his first appearance at a major international tournament, while John Stones seemed distinctly rusty. The pair played themselves into trouble on several occasions, and were hesitant when they had to get out of it.
When Marc Guéhi, a surprise omission from the starting line-up, came on for a late cameo he almost immediately took possession under pressure and played two of the kind of sharp, one-touch passes that Stones, in particular, had seemed too nervous to pick out. Guéhi only had a few minutes in which to prove any kind of point, but it felt like he did so.
It will be interesting to see whether Tuchel persists in pairing Stones with Ezri Konsa at centre-half against Ghana and Panama, and whether there is evidence that the coaching staff has worked on a plan to play out from the back in a manner which creates fewer hairy moments – or whether England’s players begin to trust their technique a little more in such situations.
It was noticeable that despite Tuchel’s focus on possession and patient build-up, England were at their best when the structure of the game began to break down and the match became more chaotic. The more direct passing after half-time not only served to break the shackles of the Croatian press, but also allowed England’s attacking pace to come to the fore.
With players like Jude Bellingham, Anthony Gordon and Noni Madueke in attack, England have the directness to exploit space in behind. Patient build-up from the back seldom creates opportunities to get around the back of a defence or into gaps between the lines. Maybe a little more leeway to look for direct passes wouldn’t be such a bad thing given the resources that England have at their disposal.
After Bellingham’s goal and the flurry of attacks which followed, Croatia struggled to reassert the kind of pressure that they put on England’s defence in the first 45 minutes. The problem went away as the opposition’s energy levels dipped and their discipline slipped. Future opponents may not take their foot off the pedal quite so easily.
England have every right to be content with Wednesday’s performance and to take heart from a match in which they were ultimately the better team – but the defence didn’t come out of the match with flying colours, and England need to improve at the back in order to have a real chance at winning a first World Cup in six long decades. There is little doubt that other teams at the tournament will have taken note of the visible vulnerabilities on display.
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