- 5/28/2025
Thomas Tuchel has now taken charge of his first two England games, and overseen back-to-back Wembley wins over Albania and Latvia. While neither performance set pulses racing, the new system he deployed featured starring roles for a number of players. In particular, Arsenal's Myles Lewis-Skelly, who both inverted into the midfield and raided with the flank. Adam Clery unpicks both performances and looks at what it tells us about the future of the England team.
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00:00Good morning, good afternoon and are you to everybody? Adam Cleary here from, this is the first time I get to say it, ACFC, the Adam Cleary Football Channel, which is mad, isn't it?
00:12England have begun life under Thomas, William, Henry, Christopher, St George, Tuchel, with two by-the-numbers tea and biscuits Wembley wins, and now we know roughly what that national team's going to look like.
00:23Should we be getting excited? I don't know, should we be getting carried away? Probably not, should our trousers be around our ankles and rub our thighs in excitement for the World Cup?
00:33Tylee, up to you, that one, your discretion, but for me personally, I think we have now seen enough of this team to know that Thomas Tuchel has identified one or two major issues England have been having and has taken steps to address them.
00:48But what are those issues and what are those steps? Well, here, my friends, is a video about that, about those things.
01:00Okay, so yes, before we start, first video on a new channel, a degree of housekeeping for you.
01:05Yeah, so welcome to ACFC. I should not be doing a video today. I literally started the job yesterday as I posted everywhere and said, hey, look at me, I'm doing a thing.
01:19And as you'll know if you started a job, day one consists of getting your laptop from IT, signing into your emails, having to shake 500 people's hands, learning where the tea and coffee making facilities are, and then subsequently where the bathroom is.
01:33And that means that the state-of-the-art motion graphics background thing, haven't sorted that out yet.
01:39The title cards and the nameplates on social media, haven't sorted that out yet.
01:42The really cool little counters I'm going to use to illustrate the players and the formations and stuff, haven't got those sorted out yet.
01:49This isn't even the proper table I'm going to end up using, but we announced it and like 3,000 people subscribed when there's literally no video.
01:59So I thought the cameras work and the lights work and I work.
02:04So let's just, let's do something.
02:06So if nothing else, when this is the slickest, sexiest, most overproduced you channel you've ever seen in your life,
02:12you can then tell everybody that you were one of like the first few hundred people that watched the initial video,
02:18where it was good and promising and the signs were there, but it was not quite the finished article yet.
02:25But just like, yes, you get it? It's a living metaphor.
02:30I'm very clever.
02:31Right, so yes, the Sabutio men were all 442 company property.
02:34So I'm going to have to really push the boundaries of what I can do with Adobe Premiere.
02:38This was theoretically how Thomas Tuchel set England up.
02:42But what I loved about it was that it never once really looked like this.
02:46Now, just for one super quick bit of context, right?
02:49This was Gareth Southgate's side that started his first World Cup, right?
02:52You remember it, the back three, Walker there, the weird double 10, Ali, Lingard thing, Sterling up front with Kane.
02:59You remember all of this, right?
03:01About a year and a half prior, so not sort of dissimilar to what Thomas Tuchel's got to work with,
03:06this was Southgate's first England team.
03:08It's a far more standard 4-3-3.
03:10Look, Walker's doing his regulation job.
03:13There's width in the forward line like you'd expect.
03:15Rooney, Cahill, Hart, Walcott, they're all still involved.
03:18It's very similar to the side that was absolutely minging at the Euros prior to him getting the job.
03:25However, however, some of the key ideas that would become that first Southgate side are present within it.
03:32Dele Alli is involved in a far deeper role than we were used to seeing him at Tottenham.
03:36Jordan Henderson is a single pivot with two proper attackers, not passers or midfielders, either side of him.
03:43So you can see that the ideas are starting to come through, he's just not doing them all at once.
03:47So my point, which I promised I was making, was you're not looking here at the finished article of Thomas Tuchel's England.
03:53This is not what they're going to look like at the start of the World Cup, but a few of the key concepts are hidden within it.
03:59And the most easy one to talk about, the most obvious one, is Myles Lewis Skelly, because he started both games.
04:06And this was his heat map from the Latvia game.
04:12And yes, OK, like caveat, it's Latvia.
04:14They are going to enjoy a lot of the ball.
04:16But regardless, this is still a startling piece of infographic information, data, thing to look at for a left back.
04:26Because this is not just inverting into the middle and being an extra body.
04:29This is fully dictating the play in the final third.
04:34His passes from deep were excellent.
04:35He moved it forward really well.
04:37And like you saw for his goal against Albania, he isn't afraid to be the one to break beyond the midfield if he sees that the space is there.
04:45And just this one thing, literally this one thing that Tuchel has brought into the England side,
04:49immediately makes them a lot more dynamic than they have been in recent years.
04:54And I know people love to throw dynamic around as a term in football, but it just means like adaptable, flexible, like not rigid in what they're doing.
05:02They can make changes on the pitch.
05:04They can find themselves in fun and exciting situations.
05:07And so from this like starting formation of 4-2-3-1, you saw England more flat shape over the course of the game.
05:14And the most common one we saw was a 3-2-5 with Lewis Skelly moving into the middle.
05:20He sits in there with Declan Rice, the two wide players, it was Rashford and Foden in one game, Bowen in the other.
05:25They stay really wide to stretch the defence and it creates these pockets of space for the number 10s, in this case Bellingham,
05:32and it was Rodgers against Latvia to sort of operate in.
05:35And this is good, like most Premier League sides will try and get into this sort of shape when they're trying to dominate a game.
05:41But it is also the thing that most commonly leads you to horseshoe it.
05:45The opposition sits deep and narrow and you just end up passing it around the outside of them because you can't play through with them.
05:52So it's good for possession, but it's bad for... what's the word I want?
05:58Sounds like possession, but it means to go in incision.
06:02It's good for possession, that's it, bad for incision.
06:05But this, my friends, is what makes Lewis Skelly such a unique footballer and a valuable asset for England.
06:11Because you're always hearing about, oh, he used to be a midfielder, that's why he's so good in these central areas and you convert him into the middle, yada, yada, yada.
06:19But he's also got all the attributes of a dynamic, that word again, attacker, and just a normal fullback.
06:27So because he's just as comfortable playing down England's left-hand side as he is sitting in the middle and being very tidy,
06:32it enables England not just to go to a 3-2-5, but also a 2-3-5, which sounds like exactly the same thing.
06:41But it's better explained as a 2-3-2-3.
06:46Are you keeping up?
06:46And how that's supposed to work is you keep your single pivot.
06:49In these games, it was Declan Rice.
06:50But instead of one defender sort of shuffling around to give you a three,
06:54both the fullbacks kind of come in a bit and sit on the same line.
06:58And then from the front five you had, the two sort of tens, so your Bellingham and your Rodgers,
07:03they sit much deeper and you narrow this front three.
07:07So all of a sudden, through the centre of the pitch, you've got loads and loads of sort of passing angles and options.
07:14And angles are like the key thing in this system, specifically tri-angles,
07:19and specifically Rashford, Bellingham, and Lewis Skelly as a triangle.
07:24Like you can see the 2-3-2-3-2-3-5, whatever you want to call it here,
07:27like Bellingham and Rodgers have both sat a little bit deeper.
07:31You've got the two centre-backs still here, and then this line of the fullbacks with Rice.
07:35And when you get into this little configuration, you get this triangle between the three of them here.
07:40And what's really exciting and good about that is you then get what's known as rotations,
07:47which, as terminology in football goes, is one of the few things that's actually self-explanatory,
07:52because the three of them rotate.
07:54Lewis Skelly, Bellingham, and Rashford are all equally comfortable
07:57in all three positions in this little situation,
08:01either being wide, being slightly deeper, or being in the centre of the pitch.
08:04And because of that, they can just interchange totally freely.
08:08And I know ultimately the Euros were a lot of fun,
08:10but we have all mentally suppressed a lot of the football that get played.
08:14Like, think back to that same dynamic there,
08:17with Foden and Bellingham both wanting to be in the exact same part of the pitch.
08:20Kieran Trippier, on his wrong foot, never sure whether he should be overlapping or catching them up.
08:25It never really worked there, and it was a joy to watch over these last two games.
08:31If you're the opposition defence, you now do not know who's going to take the ball wide,
08:35who's going to want to attack the goal directly,
08:37who's going to run into the space, who's going to drop off,
08:39who's going to want to defeat.
08:41And that forces you to break your very disciplined shape.
08:45And that is fundamentally how you break down teams that are sitting as deep as this.
08:49Now, don't get me wrong, England did not tear either of these teams apart.
08:53We're not talking about two 8-0 wins.
08:55But ask yourself the question, right?
08:57Did it ever feel over those two fixtures?
09:00Like, England had possession for the sake of having possession?
09:03Like, they couldn't really do anything with it.
09:06Or did it feel like every single time they went forward, something happened?
09:10Might not have been a goal, might not have even been a great chance,
09:13but they did something with it.
09:15Like, this is their total shot map from that match.
09:18And I know some people find 3-0 at home to Latvia a little bit disappointing,
09:22but that's 27 chances, which against anybody is pretty good.
09:27And look at the variety of them here.
09:29Like, they're getting down the left, they're getting down the right,
09:31they're having shots from distance, they're having shots from close in.
09:34Like, to me, that's a team that is finding more and more ways
09:38to open the opposition up as the game goes on,
09:41not getting more frustrated as they can't get through.
09:44And I think, genuinely, the reason they were able to do that
09:47was this 2-3-2-3 that they kept finding themselves into,
09:50because it empowers players of these ability to make better decisions.
09:54And in fact, the best example of that freedom they're being given here
09:57is in that Myles Lewis-Skelly goal.
10:00Because if you pause it, just as Jude Bellingham makes that pass, right?
10:04This is the line of your supposed back four.
10:08Yep, digest that.
10:09This is the line of your supposed midfield three.
10:13Let you take that one in.
10:14And these are your three forwards.
10:17Like, that, to me, is a level of trust and of creativity and of flexibility
10:21that they just weren't permitted to have under Gareth Southgate.
10:25Like, all three of your midfielders are basically on a separate line of possession here.
10:30Your most advanced player breaking in on goal is your left back.
10:34We just, we never saw that.
10:37But, but, but, but, but, but, this, my friends,
10:40is what excites me the most about what I've seen from those two games, right?
10:44Because look at the four players, the four attacking players,
10:47we saw in these fixtures who were not regulars under Southgate.
10:52Bowen, Eze, Rashford, Gordon, and Rodgers.
10:56What do all five of those players have in common
11:01that someone like Phil Foden,
11:03who played pretty much every game under Gareth Southgate, doesn't?
11:06They all either carry the ball into dangerous areas or directly take players on.
11:11Like, they're not great passers.
11:12They don't go backwards.
11:14They're not surgical in the way Southgate kind of want them to be.
11:17They just get at you.
11:20And the reality is England do not currently, in my opinion,
11:22have a better centre-forward option than Harry Kane.
11:25But he is not particularly intense.
11:27He does not lead a press.
11:29Like, here he is literally going out of his way to not lead a press.
11:33But what he does do is score loads of goals
11:36and leave a lot of space for his teammates to get into.
11:39Like, this is his heat map from the game.
11:41It's the quintessential Harry Kane performance.
11:43He drops off all the time to get on the ball,
11:46to help break down a low block,
11:48but then gets his reward with central goal-scoring contributions.
11:52And if you're going to play Harry Kane or someone like him up front,
11:55then you need the rest of the team not just to be full of willing runners,
11:59but to have a mindset of, we'll attack that space.
12:03That's all of our responsibilities, whether we're the left back, the number six.
12:07When it opens up, someone's got to get in there.
12:09And you look at the second goal against Latvia, what happens there?
12:12The space opens up, and who attacks it?
12:15Not one of the forwards, not somebody you'd expect,
12:17but Declan Rice, he sees the opportunity and the team's mindset,
12:22hopefully, is that you get in there.
12:23So he does, and he gets the ball, and he rolls it across,
12:25and that's how we get a goal.
12:27Third goal, Eze, he hasn't got one single thought in his mind,
12:30aside from, I'm just going to run at these bums and score a goal,
12:35which is precisely what he does.
12:37That in itself, again, that's a level of directness.
12:40We're not used to seeing from England, really.
12:42Now again, yes, Albania, Latvia, I completely understand.
12:45I'm not saying any of us should be getting carried away.
12:48Look, my trousers are on, but I think in both the dynamism
12:53and the adaptability of Myles Lewis-Skelly
12:55and the drive and impetus of pretty much everybody else,
12:59you saw more tactical identity in this England team across two games
13:04than you arguably did over the entire European Championship,
13:09which is nice.
13:10Now, final thing, just to put a bit of a dampener on it,
13:12I would caveat all this by saying I don't personally know
13:16how in the space of like 14 months you develop a side
13:21that can beat France and Germany and Argentina and Brazil
13:24and all of them by exclusively playing your Latvias
13:28and your Albanias and what have you.
13:30But that's not my job, is it?
13:32That's Thomas Tuchel's job.
13:33So I'll just make videos about it.
13:36And speaking of which, if you have made it all the way
13:38to the end of our very first proper video here on ACFC,
13:41then I'm not worthy.
13:44Thank you so much.
13:46This is going to be the most fun any of us have ever had.
13:49And this is not the finished article
13:51by any stretch of the imagination,
13:53but hopefully that made it more fun to watch
13:55because then you'll get to see us grow and do stuff.
13:57You'd be like, oh, I remember when he accidentally
13:59left his Greg's cup of tea on the set.
14:01And now it's all 3D and he opens doors and the floor
14:04and magicians come out and stuff have not fully planned it yet.
14:08But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, right?
14:10What have we got today?
14:12Like 3,000 subscribers, 2,000 subscribers?
14:15Something like that.
14:16I will be asking this a lot.
14:18If you've enjoyed this or you've enjoyed any of my previous stuff
14:21or you just sort of want to be along for the ride,
14:23telling people we are here would be enormously,
14:28enormously well, gratefully, gratefully received by me.
14:33We've got a long road to go to get us to where we need to be.
14:36We're literally starting from zero, zero views,
14:40zero subscribers, zero everything.
14:42So any help you have the charity to give,
14:45texting your friends, putting it on Twitter,
14:48anything like that, that helps so, so, so much.
14:52Not just because it directly brings people here,
14:54but also YouTube are like, oh, people are talking about this.
14:57Maybe we should help it out.
14:59Maybe we should sort of put it out there.
15:01So that's the end of my begging now.
15:05You can get me across the socials.
15:06I don't know why I'm pointing.
15:07I haven't made anything yet.
15:08Adam Peary, C-L-E-O-I.
15:10I'll just put that in text at some point.
15:13I presume there's no other page furniture that I can point at
15:15or say anything interesting about.
15:16So thanks for watching.
15:19This is the best thing that's ever happened to me.
15:24The channel, not Thomas Tuchel's England,
15:26although if they win a World Cup, it might be.
15:29That's the end of the video.
15:31Goodbye.
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