12 hours ago
4
A gale blew in off the Baltic Sea on Monday evening. The trees that line one side of the Daugava Stadium, where England will meet Latvia on Tuesday night, swayed and groaned and as the pedestrians in the streets around the ground bowed their heads in the rain and the bitter wind, it rippled and ruffled their anoraks.
In the mini-markets that sit on many street corners, some newspaper headlines staring out from racks fretted about the latest manifestation of Russian aggression, and as commuters waited for their trams at dusk, the gusts blew umbrellas inside out. Everything here says that winter is coming.
But when England coach Thomas Tuchel and his squad landed after dark, their thoughts were only of next summer. The weather has changed for the better for them after impressive victories over Serbia and Wales and a win here will mean that they seal qualification for the World Cup finals in the USA, Mexico and Canada with two games to spare.
It does not feel too much like English arrogance to think of that prospect as a formality. Latvia could only draw at home with Andorra at the weekend and even if the pitch is poor and uneven and the Latvians will be filled with the spirit of the underdog, the odds are that Tuchel will leave Riga able to ramp up his planning for the competition he has been hired to win.
He must be delighted with the position he finds himself in. England may not be among the first rank of favourites but they have a strong squad and good prospects. Some players – Harry Kane, Declan Rice, Marc Guehi and Jordan Pickford – pick themselves. The only problems facing the coach are good problems.
The central dilemma for Tuchel is whether to find a place in his starting line-up for England's first game in the competition next summer for Jude Bellingham - and if he does include him, where does he play him? Other decisions on personnel revolve around that choice.
England are in good form under Thomas Tuchel and will face Latvia away from home on Tuesday evening
The central dilemma for Tuchel is whether Jude Bellingham should be starting in the side
Some consider the debate about the Real Madrid star a false construct and maintain that it is a contrived controversy, an issue that is only an issue until Bellingham regains full fitness after his recent shoulder surgery, whereupon they insist he will be reinstated in the first XI immediately.
But Tuchel's view of Bellingham is more nuanced than that. He has made it clear both that he dislikes Bellingham's dismissive attitude to team-mates on the pitch and that he is wary of being in thrall to a star player in the way that so many of his England predecessors have been. He wants to take a team to America, not a collection of preening individuals.
Those who chide Tuchel for his iconoclasm, for his reluctance to be dazzled by the light of a star, ignore the lessons of history in England's 60 years of drought. As Steven Gerrard pointed out last week, it is not enough for a player to be blessed with talent. At a World Cup, he has to be a good team-mate, too.
My view is not that Bellingham has to play but that, if Tuchel is the coach we need him to be, then he will use the next nine months to build the best possible version of Bellingham and rehabilitate him so that he is not just an individual talent but a leader of men.
Roy Keane, in his prime, could often cut an uncompromising figure who demanded the highest of standards from team-mates and yet he was the best leader I have ever seen in the English game.
The difference is that I never saw Keane scream 'Who Else' after he scored a goal. The difference is Keane exhorted team-mates to reach higher standards rather than scorning them for not being as good as he was.
If Tuchel can teach Bellingham those differences, if he can help him mature, if his refusal to indulge him these past couple of weeks can help to turn him into the leader England needs, then Bellingham can still be the best and most important England player at the World Cup.
If he does not play, then that will be Bellingham's failure and it will be Tuchel's failure, too. Bellingham unleashed, Bellingham unbound, Bellingham liberated from his own hubris, could be the star of the tournament.
We must hope that Tuchel uses the next nine months to build the best possible version of Bellingham and make him a leader of men
The midfield partnership of Declan Rice and Elliot Andreson means Bellingham would most likely play in the No 10 role
But that brings more hard choices. The emergence of the partnership between Rice and Elliot Anderson at the base of the England midfield means that if Bellingham starts, it is most likely that he will start in his preferred No 10 role.
Because Tuchel is smart enough to have learned the lessons of the past and will eschew the temptation to cram the side with star players playing out of position, Bellingham at 10 almost certainly means no place for Cole Palmer in the starting XI.
Other managers might have compromised and moved Palmer to a wider position because of the clamour to find a place for him but Tuchel is unlikely to do that unless injuries force his hand. Bukayo Saka will be the favourite to start on the right of the forward three, with either Marcus Rashford or Anthony Gordon on the left.
Pickford, fresh from his record eighth consecutive clean sheet as England goalkeeper, is in an impregnable position as Tuchel's No 1 and Reece James has eclipsed Kyle Walker as the preferred right back.
There are concerns about James' injury record and whether he will be vulnerable to the demands of a six-week tournament and the same applies to Manchester City's John Stones but both men should start if they are fit.
Guehi has established himself as the leading English centre half. At left back, even though Myles Lewis-Skelly is not yet the man in possession, even though Tuchel has warned him about the dangers of not starting for Arsenal, he is too good, too adaptable, too versatile and too strong to ignore.
'We are building something,' Tuchel said, as he sat in a room beneath the main stand on Monday night, 'and we are going in the right direction.' No one needs the glare from the evocative old Eastern Bloc-style floodlights that loom over the Daugava Stadium to see that.
Winter may have come to Riga but England's dreams of challenging for the World Cup are peopled with choices and flooded with sunlight.
My England XI to start the first game of the World Cup:
Jordan Pickford – Reece James, John Stones, Marc Guehi, Myles Lewis-Skelly – Declan Rice, Elliot Anderson – Bukayo Saka, Jude Bellingham, Marcus Rashford – Harry Kane.
