The knives are really out for England manager Thomas Tuchel this evening as a host of journalists have taken to social media to slam his tactics against Argentina.
Tuchel has long been regarded as one of the top coaches in the game, but he went defensive far too early in England’s World Cup semi-final defeat on Wednesday night.
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Anthony Gordon had given the Three Lions a 1-0 lead, but Tuchel made a number of subs that saw them concede massive amounts of ground to Argentina, who eventually found their way to a 2-1 comeback.
While teams sometimes have to be a bit more cautious towards the end of close games, Tuchel just overdid it a bit tonight and also started that negative approach quite early.
Take a look at the screen grab below
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Thomas Tuchel’s defensive substitutes for England against Argentina
See below for the subs Tuchel made for England, and what minute they came in, and it certainly paints a picture…
| Player subs | Minute |
| Gordon off, Konsa on | 72′ |
| Rice off, O’Reilly on | 82′ |
| James off, Burn on | 82′ |
| Stones off, Toney on | 96′ |
| Spence off, Rashford on | 96′ |
This will be an important lesson for England and for Tuchel, who surely had enough quality in the team to continue to take the game to Argentina.
No one is arguing that England should have continued to go all-out-attack, but it’s rare that a team can just defend their way to a win.
All this did was hand the momentum to Argentina, and when you allow the likes of Lionel Messi and Enzo Fernandez more and more opportunities to get into dangerous positions, you’re always going to get punished eventually.
Thomas Tuchel’s negative tactics from the 72nd minute onwards are directly responsible for England losing the semi-final against Argentina. Instead of adopting an ” Attack is the best form of Defence” approach once we had scored, he resorted to “Cowering Lions” defensive tactics which gave Argentina the confidence to raise their attacking spirit to such an extent that they overwhelmed England’s defence. He did a better job for Argentina than the Argentine Manager had done. I am absolutely gutted, as we had a real chance of winning up until this point.
I agree 100 percent with the comment above. I am no soccer coach but i played entire life. England was doing very well attacking and keeping Argentina back in their area. Also When Messi was playing on the right wing, he had no one marking him, how could let any player to have that much space to cross the ball.