Johnny Nich: England for the English manager; anything else is just ‘cheating’
What is the point of international football? At core it’s one country’s talent versus another. It is a unique competition where you can’t buy the players you need; you’ve got to grow your own.
This is why the modern fan often rejects it. Why waste your time watching a crap left-back (or a crap right-back at left-back) when for £100million, you could have the best? Why Graham Potter when you can have a Champions League winner?
There’s always those money-driven views. The winning-at-all-costs attitude that drove the FA to make this decision is what has driven the game into disreputable arms. Get money and then you can buy what you want. Why not, as a major football nation, buy a coach from elsewhere?
You don’t want to appear to be a Daily Mail Union-Jack-bloomers-on-your-head idiot, endlessly relitigating the war for xenophobes. And their reaction to Tuchel’s appointment makes you want to side with the idea.
But I go back to the point of the whole shebang. If you haven’t got an English person to do the job, you should own that failure. You should not be able to buy an alternative coach any more than we should be allowed to get Erling Haaland as a striker. After all, if you can have a German coach, why not a Norwegian striker?
The answer is that it’s against the underpinning principle of international football. But why doesn’t nationality qualification apply to a coach and their staff? It’s no good pointing to developing nations having a foreign coach as justification; they have much less depth and structure to fall back on. Everything that doesn’t apply to England.
A major football nation should be able to produce and find a coach who is English. Indeed we absolutely could but have chosen not to. That doesn’t mean it’s an insult to the English in a knee-jerk xenophobic way, just that it’s a form of cheating. Allowed by the rules but nonetheless circumventing your own failure.
It’s part of English exceptionalism, on both sides. On one hand it’s saying ‘we’re English, we’ll do what we want’ and on the other it’s a kick in the teeth for ‘our brave boys’. Neither are a good look and reveals our rather pathetic approach to such matters. It’s our lot v your lot. Not our lot and some Germans v your lot.
From a football point of view, I look forward to seeing how Thomas Tuchel operates and how long (not long) before the old WWII tropes are dragged out and I shall enjoy the fury of these stupids when we draw with Hungary or Serbia. They will destroy him in the end, sooner or later, as they would anyone else. It’s where the money is. But that’s not the point.
The FA look so weak and desperate as the only country to not have a homegrown coach of France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands and Spain – all sides we struggle to beat. It’s international football, you can’t buy players; that’s what is good about it. The same rule should apply to the whole managerial and coaching staff too.
