Bench headache will turn into a World Cup advantage

Spoilt for choice, Thomas Tuchel accepts he will need to harness the abundance of options available to him if England are to reach the pinnacle next summer

- Richard Jolly

If managing England has given Thomas Tuchel many a headache, now he can add a pain in his guts.

The impossible job, as many of his predecessors can confirm, is not good for your health. In the German’s case, the discomfort stems from the decisions he has to make. And if Tuchel is sufficiently bold in his choices that he was willing to omit Jude Bellingham from his squad in October and then bench him against Serbia on his November recall, a man with the courage of his convictions sees the difficulties of possessing a surfeit of players.

“I just hate this talk to give Alex Scott the message ‘you are not in the squad,’” said Tuchel. “I don’t like it, I have stomach pain.” It is why he has taken to naming smaller squads, so he is only dispensing bad news to one or two players per game, not four or five.

Yet England’s strength in depth will become an advantage in the World Cup; perhaps even more so in a tournament where the winners will play eight games, with the possibility of extreme heat, after seasons have become still more crammed by the expansion of the Champions League and when some of his players were denied a proper summer break last year by the Club World Cup.