Ah, there it is, that old feeling rushing back.
As a beaming Thomas Tuchel sat down behind the desk and began to talk of his grand ambitions for the England men’s team you could hear the machine whirring back into life, the intake of breath, the knives sharpening.
It’s been a long time since we’ve been in this position: a fresh chapter in the endless and unforgiving circus of the Impossible Job.
Nine years have passed since the acceptable face of FA professionalism Gareth Southgate stepped in to smooth over the Sam Allardyce fiasco. The UK had just voted for Brexit two months earlier. Barack Obama was in the White House.
In the decade since we’ve seen various iterations of the Southgate project but in all honesty it’s felt like one blob; one long experiment in statesmanlike caution designed to hold the centre together.
The weird nine-month dead zone between his resignation and the start of the new guy hasn’t helped the feeling of stasis, congealment, boredom.
At which point we should say: be careful what you wish for.
Southgate made it look easy. In fact he did such a good job of quietening the press hysteria we’ve forgotten the default setting for the England men’s team is bloodthirsty.
Southgate’s great gift to the nation was detoxifying England, but in a new age of hyper-masculinity festering in the manosphere, as Southgate addressed in his Dimbleby Lecture this week, it can be toxified again in a heartbeat.
The FA might have lost sight of that, too.
Certainly appointing a German super-coach on a short-term contract – junking everything Southgate represented, junking the decade-long project of St. George’s Park, “England DNA” and all that - suggests they’ve forgotten how things used to be and how they could be again.
Tuchel hasn’t. His early press conferences have been genuinely outstanding exhibits of political craft.
Sidestepping the tedious issue of whether to sing the national anthem by declaring he needs to “earn my right” to do so, and even telling reporters to inform him when that day comes, was a masterstroke of public relations, permanently neutralising the question while massaging egos.
Even better was the clarity with which he laid out his mission statement, his tactical vision. “We want to see glimpses of the Premier League in the national team,” he said last Friday.
“The Premier League is a very physical league, a very physically demanding league, a very direct league. We should be proud enough of the culture and the style of English football and the English league to implement this.”
Genius. How did nobody think of that before?
For generations, England has been scrabbling around in search of an identity, looking enviously at the Germans and Spanish with their organic football culture, yet all this time England’s unique character was staring them in the face.
It isn’t surprising that it took a foreign coach to notice, to say out loud the blasphemous: that England’s hyper-globalised, hyper-capitalist brainchild has merged with the national identity.
And Tuchel is pure Premier League: a superstar manager, an infectious but petulant figure, a deep tactical thinker, and a man concerned only with the here and now.
From that perspective, the FA have accidentally made an appointment that reflects the nation’s real football culture.
If only it was that simple.
Talk is cheap, political grandstanding easy before a ball has been kicked. The England job drains the life out of you. It makes you tetchy, paranoid, insular.
And when (not if) that happens to Tuchel the proactive Premier League-style football will shrivel and more regressive instincts - the ones that held Southgate like a vice - may emerge.
Tuchel won the Champions League in his first half-season at Chelsea by tightening up and playing on the counter-attack. He didn’t have time to implement complex progressive tactics, he didn’t have the elite defenders he needed, and he wanted to minimise risk in a high-stakes knockout tournament.
That should sound familiar.
Jordan Henderson and Dan Burn, Marcus Rashford and Kyle Walker: these aren’t the picks of a manager expecting to build on Southgate’s legacy.
That might not be a bad thing. There is logic in trusting experience and leaning into physicality.
But beneath the buzz and the pleasantries this week you can already put together a picture of how this thing might fall apart: broken promises, conservative thinking, and a failure on terms naively set out before the first camp had gathered.
Tuchel will forever be a part of England’s footballing history now, a history that says so much about its muddled national identity; about its self-loathing and exceptionalism, its sense of glorious failure and bitterly lost empire, where success is preferred but all that really counts is spectacle.
Getting all that to fit together is hard work.
Tuchel has a plan, that’s good. But the last guy made this look a lot easier than it is.
Welcome to the show, Thomas, and welcome back everyone else. It should be a good one.
More from Sporting Life
Safer gambling
We are committed in our support of safer gambling. Recommended bets are advised to over-18s and we strongly encourage readers to wager only what they can afford to lose.
If you are concerned about your gambling, please call the National Gambling Helpline / GamCare on 0808 8020 133.
Further support and information can be found at begambleaware.org and gamblingtherapy.org.
