Got to say touché to Tuchel

Just when it felt safe to sit back and enjoy a World Cup with little emotional investment or personal expectation, England have ruined it all by giving their fans a glimmer of unwanted hope.

For us long-suffering supporters of the Three Lions, this is nothing short of cruelty.

Like millions, I have endured the 56 years of hurt manfully. And yes, it is 56 because, as I have explained before, you can’t start counting the years of hurt from the day you win a World Cup. That’s just stupid.

But I digress. As a result of those accumulated decades of pain, I now spend the two years between tournaments quietly but forcefully suppressing any thoughts that the next one could be ‘the one’.

It’s just easier that way.

And then another tournament comes around, England put in a performance that makes your body twitch in places it shouldn’t and, all of a sudden, you feel yourself starting to believe again.

Damn it.

Hope is back… and experience suggests that is rarely a good thing for us England fans

Victory over Croatia was anything but a foregone conclusion as it was probably England’s toughest group game. Yet they played with flair, energy and belief, and were as exciting going forward as I have seen them in the last decade.

The movement had purpose, the attacking play had clarity, and for once it felt like a team doing things deliberately rather than hoping something might happen.

What really stood out came at 3-2. This is traditionally the point where England begin to shrink, protecting the idea of a lead rather than the lead itself by throwing defenders on the pitch in a desperate attempt to hold on.

Instead, Thomas Tuchel went the other way, making brave, attacking substitutions that suggested he was fully aware that continuing to take the game to the opponents was the best way of seeing it out. Another goal, 4-2, and job done.

Very refreshing.

I still have some reservations, namely with the defence, which looked shakier than it should at the start of a major tournament. It wasn’t totally catastrophic, but it made you suspect that deeper in the tournament, against better opponents, it could be horribly exposed. It’s almost as if it was missing something solid, like a Harry Maguire...

But overall credit where it is due. Tuchel appears to know what he is doing, which is encouraging and, given the circumstances, slightly concerning.

Because now hope is back. Not loud, not overwhelming, but present. And experience suggests that is rarely a good thing for us England fans.

Holding on for a hero

Big tournaments have a habit of creating heroes you didn’t know you needed, and this time one has arrived in the unlikely shape of Cape Verde goalkeeper Vozinha.

At 40, when most players are easing towards coaching badges or five-a-side Tuesdays, he produced a performance that forced the world to stop scrolling and pay attention. Spain had the ball, the chances and the narrative, yet still kept running into a man who had quietly decided that none of it was going in.

It wasn’t just the saves, though there were plenty. It was the sense of resistance, of a debut nation standing firm in a moment that should have overwhelmed them. Suddenly he is trending globally, picking up followers at a rate usually reserved for pop stars, meme accounts and people who accidentally go viral for setting their underpants on fire.

The slightly sad undertone was that not everyone got to share the moment. While Vozinha was becoming an overnight global name, his mother was watching from home, unable to attend because she simply couldn’t afford the visa. For all its talk of being a global game, football can still draw some very painful lines.

But this is where the story bends back in on itself. The barrier, in this case, hasn’t held. The visa cost has now been waived by the US government, and she is expected to be in the stands for her son’s game against Uruguay today.

This World Cup, organised by a man whose sliminess is growing by the game, doesn’t often deal in neat endings, but every now and then it allows one to slip through.

Hitting the net running

Most major tournaments take a little time to get warmed up.

The stars arrive, the expectations follow, and then, for a game or two, everything feels slightly undercooked. The touches are safe, the finishing is rusty, and the big names tend to ease themselves into things.

Not this time.

From the opening round, the tournament’s heavy hitters have started firing as if they’ve skipped that entire warm up phase. Erling Haaland, Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, Kai Havertz and Harry Kane have all made immediate contributions, as have the likes of Vincius Jr, Musiala, Jude Bellingham, Alexander Isak and Viktor Gyökeres.

Messi and Mbappé, in particular, have simply carried on where they left off four years ago. Three goals for one, two for the other, and a sense that neither sees any reason to wait for the tournament to settle before taking control of it. But they are not alone, and that is what makes this feel a bit more exciting.

Across the board, there is a lack of hesitation. Strikers are striking early, teams are committing numbers forward, and the usual feeling-out process has been replaced by something far more direct. It has given many of the opening games an edge that tournaments don’t always have.

Whether that pace is sustainable is another question entirely. But for now, the biggest names in the game have decided to show up from day one. And that is not always the case.

Consistently inconsistent

If there were any lingering thoughts that VAR’s inconsistencies were largely a domestic issue, this World Cup has done a decent job of putting them to bed.

The tech is being used in this tournament in more ways than ever before. It has the right to intervene on just about everything from mistaken identity to wrongly awarded throw-ins. It probably even has the authority to let a ref know if a player pulls a face behind his back.

All fine in theory, as always with VAR, but in practice what it means is that the system simply has more ways to get things slightly wrong. And it’s doing that with sublime regularity.

Not catastrophically, not in ways that define entire tournaments overnight, but in the steady, irritating drip of decisions that don’t quite add up. There have already been multiple goals that looked offside, felt offside and yet survived the process. The kind of calls that used to be forgiven as human error are now harder to accept when three men are sitting in a box watching TV purely to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Then there are the smaller moments, the ones VAR is now empowered to correct but often doesn’t. Corners going the wrong way, deflections missed, decisions waved through that could easily be tidied up with a quick check.

And then, inevitably, there are the bigger ones: Mbappé bursting into the box, getting cleared out in one of the clearest penalties you will ever see. Yet despite having VAR in place the ultimate decision was a corner.

Maybe the ref was to blame, having refused to change his mind after watching a replay but, even so, it is another ‘wrong decision’ that was made despite the existence of video replays.

This is where VAR finds itself again. Not completely broken, not entirely useless, but persistently unconvincing and adding nothing to the beautiful game that we didn’t have before.

E-mail: Jamescalvertmalta@gmail.com

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