Tonight, England face Albania in their first game under Thomas Tuchel, the first foreigner to take charge of the national side since 2010. That was the summer in which Fabio Capello, an Italian, oversaw a miserable World Cup campaign. After a 4-1 defeat to Germany sent England home, Capello was drummed out, and the Football Association appointed three homegrown managers in succession.
For many, the notion of a foreign coach is anathema: isn’t international football supposed to be the best of ours against the best of theirs? At the very least, for England to turn abroad feels like an admission of failure, an acknowledgement that the English system is not producing high-level coaches and managers. And Tuchel is not just foreign: he is German, and for the past century nothing has seemed quite so obviously inimical to England as Germany.
The wars colour everything. Even when Germany aren’t involved, it’s common enough to hear England fans singing “Ten German Bombers”, gleefully emphasising the countdown after “the RAF from England shot them down”, or humming the theme to The Great Escape or The Dam Busters. It’s hard to imagine that changing just because England now have a German manager.
Yet this feels a significant step. When England faced Germany in the semi-final of Euro 96, The Mirror mocked up Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne in military helmets and with the headline, “Achtung, Surrender! For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over”. It’s hard to imagine England could even have contemplated a German manager then; even the appointment of a Swede, when Sven-Göran Eriksson got the job in 2001, provoked apoplexy in the Mail, which screamed, “We’ve sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness”. And yet there is Tuchel, broadly accepted, leading England into a World Cup qualifying campaign.
Tuchel actually seems rather more popular in England than in Germany, where his neo-vegetarian nerdery sat uncomfortably at Bayern Munich. But when things go wrong for him in the England job, he will be accused of not understanding “our” game. Even his interim predecessor Lee Carsley, who was born in Birmingham but played for Ireland, faced howls of protest in some quarters for his refusal to sing the anthem — not a political act, he explained, but because he felt singing would disrupt his focus. Tuchel has said he needs to “earn the right” to sing the anthem, a politically adroit policy, but whether he does so or not, an awareness of his nationality will in part shape reactions. The entire recent history of Anglo-German relations, in fact, can be traced through football.
There were the tentative early meetings in the Thirties, when England was broadly disdainful of German football and its high-minded decision to remain amateur. This was an ethos that was quickly adopted by the Nazis and repackaged into sensuous propaganda by Leni Riefenstahl. Professional sport, it was decreed after the Anschluss, was a Jewish perversion. As a result, the highly successful Austrian league was forced to return to amateurism and a great footballing culture was destroyed. A month before that announcement, in June 1938, England had already, in the spirit of appeasement, given the Nazi salute before a 6-3 win in Berlin.
There may be a level of irony to the chant of “Two World Wars and One World Cup” — not least because Germany have won four World Cups — but when England won their only World Cup in 1966, beating West Germany in the final, the Second World War was very much on people’s minds, a point made by Duncan Hamilton in Answered Prayers. The evidence of bombing was still evident in many cities, while every adult knew somebody who had been killed in the fighting. The maths is obvious, but the point is worth stressing: that final came just 21 years after VE Day, and the events of the war were less distant than today is from 9/11.
Certainly there was an awareness on the German side of the need for sensitivity. Their coach was Helmut Schön, who had fled the Soviet zone for the West in May 1950. He had been an air-raid warden in Dresden and seen terrible things. “Women lay in the streets”, he wrote in his autobiography, “charred black or dried out like Egyptian mummies. They had children in their arms, bundles of ashes.” When the fires were extinguished, 30,000 charred corpses were stacked up by the Kreuzkirche and the job the firestorm had begun was finished off with flamethrowers. “We were used to gigantic numbers, including the victims of our own country”, Schön said. “That was abstract. Now we could see the reality: 30,000 individual people who had died terrible deaths.”
Yet Schön, who spent five days hunting through the smoking rubble for his father, seems to have harboured no sense of bitterness against Britain. His family was liberal, and had rented out an apartment to a Jewish publisher until as late as 1939. Schön had no doubt who was to blame for the war and told his players before they came to England in 1966 that what mattered was less whether they won than whether they “behaved like gentlemen”. Their job was to rehabilitate the international image of Germany.
Although England beat West Germany in the final, that meeting at Wembley turned out to be the first part of a five-act sequence that would overturn their respective footballing statuses. West Germany achieved a first-ever win over England in a friendly in 1968, a game whose significance was widely ignored in England but gave West Germany great self-confidence. West Germany then came from 2-0 down to beat England in the World Cup quarter-final in Mexico in 1970, before outplaying England in beating them 3-1 at Wembley in the first leg of the European Championship quarter-final in 1972. L’Équipe described the German performance as “football from the year 2000”. In the second leg in Berlin, England, apparently giving up any hope of turning the tie around, played out an aggressive and negative 0-0 draw. In less than a decade, West German football had accelerated past England: it was the future; England some moribund relic. After West Germany’s economic miracle, anybody looking at the relative economies of the two countries might have drawn a similar conclusion.
Although Schön was still manager as West Germany won the World Cup on home soil in 1974, when England didn’t even qualify, he had become an oddly distant figure. The players had threatened strike action over bonuses before the tournament, something Schön, who came from a generation with a clear sense of patriotic duty, couldn’t comprehend. When West Germany then lost to East Germany in the first group stage, he had some sort of breakdown with the result that the captain Franz Beckenbauer effectively took over: the generation of self-assertive boomers were led by one of their own.
But whatever reservations there were, at home and abroad, about the behaviour of certain German players, they kept beating England, most notably in the semi-final of both the 1990 World Cup, their last tournament before reunification, and Euro 96, their first tournament as a united nation. Players such as Jürgen Klinsmann, who had family in the East and regarded football as a symbol, perhaps even a tool, of rapprochement, were baffled by the English obsession with a war half a century in the past.
In the flush of victory in 1990, Beckenbauer, by then the manager, had said that he felt sorry for other nations because a united Germany would be unbeatable. It has not turned out like that, although Germany did win the 2014 World Cup. In competitive games since 2000, England actually have the edge, with three wins to two (including their famous 5-1 World Cup qualifying win in Munich).
Yet German coaching is far more influential than English coaching. There is a discernible German School, born out of Swabia, that prioritises winning the ball back as soon as possible by the high-risk deployment of players high up the pitch — Gegenpressing. The likes of Jürgen Klopp, Jogi Löw, Ralf Rangnick, Hansi Flick, Julian Nagelsmann and, yes, Tuchel, led the resistance to the hegemonic possession-heavy style favoured by Pep Guardiola.
There is no English School. The Premier League might be the best league in the world. It’s certainly the richest. But what that means is that it imports talent, coaches in particular. There are only two English managers in the Premier League. And that perhaps is why there has been so little outcry about Tuchel. It’s less that England has suddenly become a mature and cosmopolitan nation than that the Premier League is essentially a global league that happens to be played in England.
Just as you can wander through parts of London and barely see a building that isn’t owned by Saudis or Russians or Japanese, so our football clubs are owned by oligarchs, sheikhs and hedge funds. These potentates then appoint the best coaches — or at least the coaches they believe to be the best — with no parochial interest in developing local talent. So everybody gets used to the idea that the best coaches are foreign. And now that English academies have, after their overhaul following the failure to qualify for Euro 2008, begun to turn out high-level playing talent, it seems logical that the best coach to lead them into the World Cup should be foreign, even if he is German.
For a nation that can’t help selling off its assets and institutions, this is a decision rooted in pragmatism. And so we end up with a situation where the man appointed to make it two World Cups would have been on the other side in the two World Wars.
Perhaps that’s just what reconciliation looks like. Perhaps it’s just modern England.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/
