Thomas Tuchel

THOMAS Tuchel is the new England manager and his arrival has been treated like the great admission of failure that it is.

A nation which wangs on about having the best league in the world, the best knockout cup competition in the world and lots of other best things in the world has decided that none of its 60 million people are good enough to manage its football team.

Instead, we have had to outsource the job to Germany in the kind of process we were told that a vote for Brexit was going to stop.

There will be those will wanting Liz Truss to quickly update her speech lines. We import two thirds of our cheese – THAT. IS. A. DIS-GRACE. – and now we’ve done the same with the England manager.

It’s wokery gone mad, or something like that. What next? A German royal family?

To see people fretting over whether Tuchel will sing the national anthem gowever has been a comical silver lining to the overall admission that we haven’t got anybody good enough to do the job from our own ranks.

Ultimately, who cares if he does or he doesn’t?

We should be more worried that when you ask fans which proud Englishman they would want to take on the role instead, the best they can come up with is Graham Potter – fluffed a big job – and Eddie Howe, who is taking a sweet ol’ time over the job of improving a super rich club like Newcastle.

The truth is, we surrendered – if we must use these words – when we hired the last guy. Gareth Southgate’s club career at Middlesbrough involved a couple of false dawns and then an abysmal relegation, followed by the sack. With this sparkling CV, he promptly became the national team manager and squandered the easiest set of tournament draws by browning the bed every time England played one of the big beasts.

When the dust settles and perhaps Tuchel does fairly well as the manager – and he’s going to cop it like no other England manager from the British press if he doesn’t – then we may slowly come to realise why there were no English leading candidates.

Could it be that most football fans. deadened by the Southgate era, these days see England matches as an unwelcome disruption to what they love best?

That’s their own club playing on the weekends in a league of teams made up of players and managers from all corners of the world.

Maybe we didn’t notice there were no brilliant English managers around, because we were too busy enjoying how so many foreign coaches have improved our exciting “domestic” game.