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Thomas Tuchel will reach out to Jude Bellingham and the other players he excluded from his latest England squad before he makes his next selection in November.
The head coach’s decision to overlook Bellingham for the Wembley friendly against Wales last Thursday and the World Cup qualifier against Latvia in Riga on Tuesday has dominated the discourse. Tuchel wanted to show faith in the squad that won against Andorra and Serbia in September and it meant no room for those who missed out on the initial selection for fitness reasons. If Bellingham was the highest-profile absentee against Wales and Latvia, then Phil Foden was not far behind. Adam Wharton was also left out.
Tuchel’s team defeated Wales 3-0 before winning 5-0 against Latvia to secure qualification for the finals next summer with a blemish-free record: six wins out of six with six clean sheets. He is keen to maintain the momentum in the final qualifiers against Serbia at Wembley and Albania in Tirana and will lean once more towards continuity; faith in those who have delivered across two impressive camps.
But Tuchel intends to stay connected to those presently on the outside, to ensure they remain hungry for involvement, saying: “Maybe we have the chance to invite more players [in November] or share some minutes.” It is a delicate balance and the situation with Bellingham is surely the most delicate owing to his status in the game.
Tuchel tried to make clear that the Real Madrid midfielder was only one player, albeit an excellent one; he is not a special case. Asked whether he would speak to Bellingham before the next camp, he said: “I guess so, why not? Of course, he’s an important player, he’s a big player.
“I will speak to a lot of players … to the guys who were not in camp, they will get texts from me – especially them. The guys who are now here have the reward, they feel the reward and it’s now necessary also I stay in touch with the other guys.
“No one has done anything wrong, it’s not a punishment or whatever, and I feel when I text them or I speak to them everyone is eager to come back. This is how it has to be and I have trust in more players than [those] here. We always speak about the same names [outside the squad] but we have Conor Gallagher, we have Trevoh Chalobah, we have Cole Palmer injured and a lot of other guys out there who deserve to be with us and are hungry and determined to be with us.”
Tuchel has only the November and March camps before he names his squad for the finals and he has worked to streamline his options, to bring clarity in each position, defining the pecking order. Would November be a chance to make changes, given the ties are essentially meaningless in terms of results?
“Maybe, but not too much,” Tuchel said. “It needs to be deserved, first of all, and it needs to make sense. We’ll have a review of the camp and then ask also my assistant coaches who are more experienced in World Cup qualifiers than me. We will get our heads around it and take the decision when it’s decision time.”
Once again, Tuchel made plain that any player coming back in had to buy into his standards, which begin with putting the team first. “If we invite them we are sure they will buy in, or we will not invite them. Why would we? This is, how do you say, a non-negotiable.”
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Tuchel has made no secret of the fact that he is out to win the World Cup – nothing else. He is fortified by the performance levels of the past two camps after feeling his way into the job in his first two across the second half of last season, which were a little underwhelming.
“It’s a possibility, yes,” he said of winning the World Cup. “We will get there. I cannot promise that we will win it but I feel that we will get there with a strong team, a strong cohesion and the right spirit. It’s building. You can see it on the pitch. This is the basis for all of it.
“We will start analysing the favourites very early. There’s a huge amount of support in the FA, everybody is on that, there’s a machine running behind it. We will analyse right now Brazil, Argentina, Spain, France, Portugal.
“It’s a special feeling to qualify. You don’t qualify every day for a World Cup. It’s all our childhood dream to be part of that and I cannot be more proud to arrive as an England coach. I was a bit more nervous than normal before the Latvia game because I really wanted to get it over the line. It’s such a good feeling around the last two camps and it’s just nice to have the proof.”
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