Is Thomas Tuchel deluded or what?
Crank it up.
What the hell happened Wednesday? Whatever it was, it wasn’t supposed to happen, not with Tommy Tuchel, not to Tommy Tuchel.
Surely anybody, up to and including the great All-American understander of sports his own self, can tell Tommy Tooks bottled it.
Except, of course, Tommy his own self, and his coterie of process-trusting fanboys on the Internet.
Those torturous last 40 minutes Wednesday were chastening even for Tommy’s staunchest cheerleaders. How could Tommy Tooks of all people, Mr Press and Possess, think parking the Burn bus in front of the GOAT was a good idea?
Being a renegade doesn’t make you right. Sticking to your favourite guns as events unfold often makes you horribly wrong.
Sometimes, though, conventional wisdom or elite consensus or both are woefully inadequate. The need to know, or at least the need for a neat narrative, leads us so far down the garden path anybody saying “wait, are we sure?” gets written off as a crank, at best; worse, a class enemy ripe for cancellation. Not knowing, and openly admitting as much, can be uncomfortable, and most people are not very comfortable being uncomfortable.
Say what you like about Tommy Tooks, he’s crank-coded. This is a guy willing to go on live TV and say he got lucky when he won and has no regrets when he lost. He long since said goodbye to his good standing among real football men, let alone in polite society, with his steadfast refusal to accept that he’s in the results business.1
There are three basic online pigeonholes for Tommy, as for any counter-cultural leader. Straightforwardly a fraud, whose pseudo-intellectualism was always an elitist hustle. Fatally flawed, his overwrought ideas inevitably taking him so far but no further. Or flawless, unable to fail, only to be failed.
Just on priors, it seems highly unlikely he’s the messiah. And for all that souls across the land were on Wednesday overtaken by the sense he’d been a very naughty boy, his extended track record belies the idea that he’s a flat-out fraudster. So we’re stuck, as per, adjudicating the magnitude of his flaws, weighing the fallibility of his decision-making against the best available alternatives.
We start before the game had even ended with everybody agreeing that parking the Burn bus was harakiri, without the honour. Real football men could see with clarity cowardice had made defeat an inevitability. The nerds dutifully pointed out that the goals were a long-range shot following a set-piece and a moment of Messi magic, hardly tantamount to lobbing it in your own goal, but were nevertheless on the same page bottom line-wise.
Michael Cox was along first thing Thursday morning with a narrative shaker, defying conventional wisdom by rewatching the game to inform his analysis, which turned up the puzzling finding that England’s retreat had begun before Tommy’s defensive subs.
This opened up a new line of enquiry: if the players were the authors of the retreat, why didn’t their editor use his subs or the TV timeout to remind them who’s boss?
Your correspondent, whose 5-a-side debut in Mexico City resulted in days of sickness, was sympathetic to the Fatigue Theory. A squad that set out depleted by a long season went into the red playing with 10 at altitude, and again playing 120 hot and humid minutes in Miami, and spent any reserves they had going hard and pressing high to earn their lead in Atlanta. Tommy, the Theory went, treated the retreat as fait accompli and acted accordingly, if bringing on Dan Burn ever can be considered acting accordingly.
Andros Townsend, of all people, on TikTok, of all platforms, gave the narrative another shake by suggesting the turn taken by the players was more a function of the moment: time and score and a couple of close shaves behind a broken press, in a World Cup semi-final no less. While Andros didn’t go so far as to utter the word pressure while insinuating about his fellow pros, and found Tommy at fault for being slow to switch from 5-3-2 to 5-4-1, he notably didn’t say the word fatigue.
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It’s pretty clear from Tommy’s public comments about playing his ball as it lies that he believes at least one of these stories to be true, and maybe both. He’s spelled out the tiring timeline, and of course he can’t explicitly call his players bottlejobs, because there’s no form of words for that which wouldn’t be heard as throwing them under a bus much bigger than Dan Burn.2
In any case, neither explanation is exculpatory. The gap they both leave is the one-way-ness of it all, the Pickford punts to nowhere and the lack of moves to initiate any sort of functional outlet. Tommy, as your correspondent has been known to say, was supposed to be the man who never forgot everything’s a tradeoff. Yet he was seemingly willing to allow Argentina to repeatedly roll for free, every man attacking, without any risk they’d pay a price at the other end. And when fatigue is already hurting you, that’s even more reason to add a threat on the counter, to kill the game, because you’re fully cooked if it gets to extra time.
It’s far from obvious how often England would have lost if those final 40 played out 10,000 times, or whether they were less likely to lose in the wake of different decisions. To some it seems obvious that anything quacking like a defence of Tommy’s tactics is a vested interest carrying water for a crank or a class enemy. Maybe it is, or maybe the real football men have a vested interest in defending their God-given right to a comfortable life wrapped in a story familiar enough not to chafe.
Cultures built on pride and honour have a lot going for them, psychically and socially. Coordination problems are hard to solve, and need to be solved; in-groups with shared identities are the best way mother nature’s found to do that. Counting against are the simplicity and rigidity of the ties that bind them, which are poor fits for a highly complex and rapidly changing world.
If you believe we should be burning witches at the stake, you’re a full crank. If you believe we should be segregated by race, you’re somehow a former crank. If you believe we should be factory-farmed by species, you’re a future crank.3
Some cranks are harder to spot. When the winner of one game says they were lucky, you can’t tell if they’re well-calibrated or a performative crank. When the loser says no regrets, you can’t tell whether they’re well-adjusted or delusional. (If the loser says they’re the winner, that’s a different kettle of fish.)
Is Thomas Tuchel a crank? Are his defenders? Is your correspondent? Give us 10,000 runs through the simulation, or at least 10 to start with, and then we’ll see.
Training data
📽️Michael Clayton (2007). Come for Clooney’s moment at peace with the horses, stay for the lawyer growing sick of defending the indefensible. Did it drive him mad, or was acting mad the only way he could break the ties that bind?
🎵King Kunta (2015). “What the fuck happened? / I swore I wouldn’t tell, but most of y’all sharing bars / Like you got the bottom bunk in a two-man cell / Something’s in the water.”4
📖Bewilderment (2022). A kid sees with clarity how animals are treated, struggles to cope with what that says about the adults around him, and is written off as unwell. More Marmite than Powers’s Overstory; my favourite book about being at odds with the dominant narrative.
Next play
Being right is not enough
A decade ago (somehow), Wardell Stephen Curry II, aka Steph, Chef, or the Baby-faced Assassin, was making and shaping history. Unbound by unwritten rules of engagement, carefree and without conscience, he had learned there was nothing and nobody who could stop him raining long-range bombs on shell-shocked opponents. Bang! Bang!
Same playlist, ever growing
FIFA getting it on the nose with the Championship ringz, as if soccerball wasn’t already steeped enough in ringz culture. There are far too many people who withheld GOATness from Messi until his team won the World Cup on penalties.
And naturally there’s little to no hope of us ever getting the who-knew-what-when tick-tock, unless it happens to be advantageous for an agent to leak some hot goss, because investigative reporting is beyond the remit of almost all football journalists.
Let's wait until after the World Cup to grapple with the emergence of carbon- vs silicon-based sentience as a relevant moral quandary.
“...everybody wanna cut the legs off him.”