‘Merchants of Woke’, ‘dark days’ and the end of ‘England DNA’ as GERMAN Tuchel named manager

As you may have noticed, Thomas Tuchel is going to be the next manager of England, and the Daily Mail’s heads have duly fallen entirely off.

Men with Sven
We’ll get round to all the Daily Mail’s absurd and ridiculous coverage, we promise, but if you’ll indulge Mediawatch for a moment we are going to start with the bits that have have made us genuinely angry. And that’s the frequent crass, unnecessary and above all inaccurate digs at Sven-Goran Eriksson.

It would be deeply unpleasant so soon after his death even if the jibes were accurate. Which they absolutely aren’t. Sven might not have been English, and you can argue all you like about whether his record constituted success, failure or somewhere in between, but what he absolutely, undeniably did have was a deep and abiding knowledge of and love for English football. And those feelings survived his time dealing with the utter insanity of the English (and it is English really, not British) newspaper industry.

Indeed, he had their number from the start, which might explain a fair bit of how the nastiness continues after his death.

Way back in 2006 he said: “The English aren’t strange. It’s their press that’s strange.”

They may never have proved him more thoroughly right than today.

In a genuinely batsh*t back-page editorial under the entirely sane and rational headline…

A DARK DAY FOR ENGLAND – Three Lions gamble on a GERMAN… and Thomas Tuchel only has 18 months to prove he’s up to it

…Eriksson is dismissed as having a ‘take-the-money-and-run’ attitude that he shared with Fabio Capello who was also foreign. Only a foreign manager, you see, would take a £1m pay-off after resigning in disgrace having been England manager for one whole gam… oh no, wait, that was Sam Allardyce who weirdly doesn’t merit a mention here for what Mediawatch can only assume must be reasons of space.

But the Mail aren’t finished there.

With grinding inevitability they’ve wheeled out Jeff Powell to offer his own thoughtful, considered take on the matter. That’s how you know it’s really serious, because the Mail only rouse Rowley Birkin from his boxing-column slumbers for English football matters of truly seismic proportions, such as the caretaker manager not singing the national anthem.

He launches in with customary brio and a scathing attack on a beloved football figure whose recent death united the sport in grief.

Mediawatch has seen and read enough tabloid unpleasantness to fill several lifetimes and the grime may never truly be washed from our skin, but just as we think there is nothing left to shock us someone starts a column like this.

When Sven-Goran Eriksson was appointed England manager I wrote words to the effect that the birthright of the country which gave football to the world was being sold to someone from a nation of cross-country skiers who spend half their lives in darkness.

It took a while for that sentiment to be proved correct, and during his era of World Cup failure the Swedish lothario endeared himself sufficiently to our big-hearted people to be given a sentimental send-off when he passed away in sad circumstances this year.

Always good to start any piece with details of how you got the last laugh on a man who recently died. To write something that spiteful and then attribute the fact that people were still sad about the man’s death to the fact that English people are just so damned big-hearted is unhinged.

He’s not done, either, delivering what may be the most backhanded ‘rest in peace’ we’ve ever seen and certainly ever hope to see.

May he rest in peace and his family live happily ever after on the generational wealth lavished upon him by the FA.

We do wonder what someone like Oliver Holt makes of this. We’ve had our run-ins with Holt over the years, sure, but we can’t imagine he finds it easy to stomach working somewhere that considers this kind of thing not just acceptable but to be actively encouraged.

It’s worth reading again the tribute Holt wrote for the Mail after Eriksson’s death less than two months ago, one because it’s very good but also because it just seems so utterly hollow now that the inherent nastiness at the heart of the company he works for has been revealed once again.

And beyond all of that, he had a gift that transcended all of that and which stayed with him until his dying day: he was full of so much joy, so much love for football and footballers, so much kindness and so much generosity of spirit that he made people happy.

More than any trophy or any victory, that is the greatest gift of all.

He clearly also made – and still makes – some very small and very bitter men very, very angry.

Changing of the Guard
Let’s move on to some of the lighter stuff, the more genuinely funny avenues of nonsense down which the press pack have sauntered this morning.

Perhaps Mediawatch’s favourite part of it all is what we’re dubbing The Pep Exception. We thought of the name just now.

First up, Mediawatch doesn’t really agree with the idea that all international football teams should have to employ a coach from their own country. Seems at the very, very least like an unfair limitation on the scope for improvement of smaller nations. And while it’s an easy enough and very necessary rule to have for players, it’s also not hard to see how entirely unenforceable it quickly becomes once you get beyond that even if you do consider it desirable.

How, for instance, does one go about stopping any international team having a ‘foreign’ coach running things from behind the scenes? This, really, is surely the main reason why such a rule does not exist and has never seriously been attempted. It just wouldn’t work.

It’s also an idea that can lead you very quickly and very uncomfortably down some quite unpleasant roads. It wasn’t meant quite how it sounded, but Mediawatch definitely felt its buttocks clench when Harry Redknapp started talking about ‘English blood’ on the radio this morning.

But we will accept that as an idealistic sporting culture kind of idea, there is merit to the ‘best of our v best of yours’ argument. We totally understand why lots of people – not all of whom are certifiable Daily Mail columnists – think it would be best if international football did have such rules.

Fine.

However, so many people who hold those views give the entire game away when the name changes from ‘Thomas Tuchel’ to ‘Pep Guardiola’. There are so, so many examples of people telling on themselves. They do it openly, we don’t even have to go looking for it.

Take that tubthumping Mail editorial, for instance. It begins unequivocally.

International football should be the best of ours versus the best of theirs.

But then, a few paragraphs of standard by-the-numbers xenophobic sh*te later:

We may have made an exception for the mighty Pep Guardiola, but now we have a gun for hire who owes us nothing and will pass through our game with a huge cheque and no connection to the fans or players.

International football should be the best of ours against the best of theirs but also we can have Pep Guardiola because reasons.

The Mail also have Ian Herbert, lamenting the end of ‘England DNA’ running through the national set-up but then conceding:

Pep Guardiola would have been an irresistible proposition, a name so stellar that his appointment would drown out all the angst and concerns about the need to recruit an Englishman, to preserve what makes international football different.

Perhaps best of all, though, you’ve got Sam Wallace in the Telegraph under the following headline

Why Thomas Tuchel should not be England manager

He shakes his head sadly and notes with disbelief how:

It is remarkable that after 1,066 England games over 152 years, one still has to point out that international football is about measuring one country’s resources against another.

Presumably those who remarkably need this pointing out include a Telegraph journalist who three days ago wrote so admiringly of how the FA could ‘shoot for the stars’ and tempt Guardiola to take the job in the ‘most ambitious project for governing body since the rebuilding of Wembley’. We’ll give you three guesses, but are sure you need only one.

Merchants of Woke
Anyway, let’s get back to the rest of Jeff Powell’s nonsense, shall we?

When the sauerkraut goes the way of the smorgasbord and the pasta – as looks likely given that Tuchel is a one-year impact manager and the next World Cup is not upon us until 2026 – will the euro finally drop?

Foreign foods are funny, aren’t they? Pasta and such. Brilliant. Then there’s this.

That whether or not Gareth Southgate was a glass half-full or glass half-empty personality, the manager of England should be… English. Someone born and raised in the football culture of this country, someone immersed in the best and worst of our national characteristics, someone who knows what makes us tick and what buttons need pressing to get the most out of our footballers.

Worth remembering that in Powell’s world, crass digs at recently deceased football managers whose major crime was being Swedish comes under ‘best’ rather than ‘worst’ in the ol’ national characteristics ledger.

After a brief pause to fight the Carsley national anthem war a further time comes this.

‘Little Englander’ I hear the merchants of woke cry. No, this is how is (sic) should be for every country in the world, that’s why we call them national teams.

Mediawatch is pretty sure it saw Merchants of Woke at Reading in 2003.

Not only the manager and players but everybody involved, right down to the kit man, should be English. So it should be with every football nation, large or small.

Now far be it from us to suggest that Jeff might not have entirely thought through the practicalities of implementing this in the real world that exists beyond the piss-soaked pages of the Daily Mail, but Mediawatch is fascinated to know how such a rule might be policed and enforced.

He’s really only just getting started, though. Just marvel at this paragraph, three sentences of the purest, uncut Powell; the very essence of Birkin at his unimprovable best.

How can a foreigner urge Englishmen to do or die on football’s battlefield? Could a Swede, an Italian or a German have roused the troops like King Henry V when he implored his men: ‘On, on unto the breach dear friends or let close the wall up with our English dead.’ Sometimes when all else fails, only passion can save the day.

Even ignoring everything else about this, pretty sure England have given ‘passion’ a decent go on a few occasions, with less than stellar results.

A bit over-dramatic? Maybe.

Definitely.

But perhaps only a graphic illustration can bring English football to its senses.

Any chance of anyone bringing this very normal country to its senses? And just wait until Rowley finds out Henry V was born in Wales, sorry WALES.

The Sun always shines
Mediawatch was briefly yet pleasantly surprised to see The Sun get almost to the end of the headline without being weird about the FA appointing a very successful football manager to be the England football manager.

Thomas Tuchel has all the ingredients to become a classic England manager – tactical nous, drive and a tangled love life

So close. But given the raging binfire that is the rest of this morning’s coverage around the place then frankly we’ll take it.

Max power
Elsewhere in The Sun – we can’t even bring ourselves to get involved with the lederhosen – comes the inevitable:

Meet Thomas Tuchel’s girlfriend and England’s new first lady Natalie Max

The sound of silence
To the Mirror next, where Harry Kane has set another record.

Harry Kane breaks silence on Thomas Tuchel as he agrees to become England manager

Let’s ignore the ambiguity here that could be read as Kane agreeing to become England manager because headline writing is hard and often victim to such things, but this is surely the fastest a silence has ever been broken, given Kane’s stoic silence about Tuchel being named England manager ended before Tuchel was named England manager. It’s like running the 100m in minus three seconds. Or something.

And, you’ll be staggered to know, Kane’s views on the manager who convinced him to join Bayern Munich are earth-shattering in their shock value.

‘To be honest, I haven’t heard anything specific about it yet. That’s why I can’t really comment on it until it’s officially announced. We’ll have to wait and see what happens.

‘I obviously know Thomas very well from the last year. He’s a fantastic coach and a fantastic person. I’m sure the FA will contact me when they know more about this issue.’

His name is Rio
You can’t move for hot gossip from the Mirror today, though, as they also bring us this:

Rio Ferdinand reveals England dressing room reaction to Thomas Tuchel appointment

Genuinely interesting to get a direct view from the current players, so this should be interesting.

‘I think the players will be happy,’ he said on his YouTube channel.

Oh. Right.

Reece’s pieces
Of course, you can’t have a new manager appointment without speculation about how his team might line up. The Mirror do the necessary, albeit with the slightly inconvenient issue that with international teams you can’t just pretend he’s going to immediately make ‘three dream signings’. In its place comes ‘three bold calls’.

One of those three bold calls is to get Reece James to not be injured all the time and we have to say that seems like a very good idea. Surprised no other Chelsea or England managers have attempted it, really.

One of the others is Bukayo Saka at left wing-back which whatever else you may think of it is undeniably bold.