Carsley out, Tuchel in; so which way now for England?
England's 5-0 win against Ireland meant that Lee Carsley bowed out with a bang after six games. And what about after the summer of 2026?
It was, without any doubt whatsoever, a game of two halves. For 45 minutes against Ireland yesterday afternoon England seemed to be stuck in that very English groove of passing the ball around while not really creating anything of note, but five minutes into the second half Liam Scales was undone by Jude Bellingham for a double-whammy of a second yellow card and a penalty kick. Harry Kane converted the kick, and with that the floodgates opened.
In some football video games there exists a bug, that if a player is sent off against you the opposition doesn't alter its formation, leading to an enormous defensive gap that your players can run through to score goals with ease. The remainder of this match felt a little like that, with some Chuckle Brothers-esque defending thrown in for the second goal and English forwards rushing through the gap left by the dismissal, with Jarrod Bowen scoring with his first touch and Taylor Harwood-Bellis scoring on his debut, just seventeen minutes after being introduced as a substitute. Had it not been for goalkeeper CaoimhÃn Kelleher, things might well have been worse for Ireland.
The end result of this was a 5-0 England win and ‘promotion’ back to the ‘A’ grouping in UEFA’s Nations League, and a successful end to Lee Carsley’s spell as the England manager. Carsley ends his six games in charge with five wins and one defeat, making him—in terms of win percentage, and yeah, probably win percentage only—the second most successful England manager of all-time after Sam Allardyce, whose 100% record from one game will almost certainly never be defeated.
So, what can Thomas Tuchel look forward to in January? What legacy has Carsley left behind? Primarily, the period between the end of the European Championships will probably be remembered—if it is remembered at all, and there are no guarantees of that—as being something of an interregnum between two eras, a little like the England of 1974 under Joe Mercer. England have returned to the top tier in the National League and that’s something.
But Carsley did also say that he wanted to increase the pool of players that may be available to Tuchel, and that is something that he also seems to have come good on. He gave debuts to eight players—Angel Gomes, Morgan Gibbs-White, Noni Madueke, Curtis Jones, Lewis Hall, Morgan Rogers, Tino Livramento and Taylor Harwood-Bellis—with Jones and Harwood-Bellis both scoring on them.
There will come a point at which the guard will have to be changed. Kyle Walker, for example, will be 36 years old by the time of the next World Cup, while Harry Kane’s apparent immobility draws questions over whether he can be considered a first pick for a tournament when he will be fast approaching 33 years of age. Is there a ready replacment for their record goal-scorer?
And is that what Tuchel would even want? He’s on a contract to 2026 only, and the expectation level behind such a signing is very clear; Tuchel’s job is to qualify for and then win the 2026 World Cup. But as a manager on a relatively short-term contract, what would his interest be in building for the future? This is a manager brought in, so far as anyone can ascertain, for the short-term energy hit of winning something. There are no guarantees whatsoever that he will stay beyond that summer.
And Tuchel doesn’t even know what his first few months will look like yet, since the schedule for the early part of next year still depends on how next month’s World Cup qualifying draw plays out. To what extent will he want to gamble on the new, and to what extent will he just stick with the tried and trusted? Of course for all that, having a bigger pool of experienced players should obviously be A Good Thing, regardless of what Tuchel actually does with them.
This, of course, raises questions over what happens in just over a year and a half’s time, when Tuchel’s contract expires. On the basis of what we know about the combustible nature of his personality, the likely savageness of the reaction from certain quarters of the press to anything that’s so much as perceived as a ‘failure’, the out-sized expectations whenever there’s a World Cup finals and the actual likelihood of England winning the next World Cup, it seems doubtful that he’ll stay much beyond that summer.
And then what? It’s tempting to wonder whether the FA will be waiting outside The Etihad Stadium with some sort of bear trap for Pep Guardiola, should he decide that about the summer of 2026 is the right time to take a sabbatical from the game, but closer to home it might even be that Carsley has bedded himself in as a prime contender for the position in a year and half’s time.
For now he’s headed back to the under-21s, but with five wins from six he leave s behind a decent record, a whole bunch of players who’ve been tried out at an international level, and a squad with which he will be familiar from that role earlier on. The truly significant blot on his copybook was the 2-1 home defeat, a performance so shambolic that it called into question the possibility that he’d sabotaged himself so as not to be considered for the position at that time.
But otherwise, what if there was a longer-term plan going on here? There’s a case to be made that giving him these six games and then sitting him back for eighteen months to keep working with younger players before returning after the 2026 World Cup, should they qualify, as a more natural long-term successor to Gareth Southgate makes sense. Considering that Southgate was one of the most successful head coaches that England have ever had, perhaps something similar could work again. Perhaps Carsley just should have been kept in the position, who knows? We’ll have a better idea in about twenty months’ time.