After positives in defeat against Spain come negatives in victory for Tuchel’s sloppy England

If Saturday’s game against Spain was a defeat with a ‘but’, then here was a 2-0 win with an ‘if’ for England over Czechia.

There was, once again, plenty to like about England’s performance both before and after the Czechs were reduced to 10 men to game-deadening effect in Prague. But again almost all the things to like came when England attacked, and almost everything England did at the back prompted real concern.

England knocked the ball around with some pretty enough shapes in the first half. Sure, the goal never came but it was a good 20 minutes after the red card before Lee Dixon was forced into a plaintive “Quicker!” about England’s attacking play.

That was a) about 15 minutes beyond the over/under we’d set in our heads and b) a pleasing piece of shorthand. Let’s be honest, “England just need to move the ball quicker” is just far too long-winded. We all know the lingo by now.

There were chances literal and figurative taken in a necessarily rejigged team. Both full-backs were excellent, Lewis Hall linking up wonderfully well on the left with Anthony Gordon, to no great surprise, and Trent Alexander-Arnold bringing his esoteric skills to the fore.

For large spells of the first half, Myles Lewis-Skelly was to be found dropping in between the two centre-backs from midfield, allowing the full-backs to push on high and wide and play essentially as wing-backs. Hall very much enjoyed this. Alexander-Arnold not so much.

Dixon can be a cranky, miserable sod, but he is a man who knows his right-back onions and we liked the point he made in the first half that for such an obviously attacking full-back, Alexander-Arnold isn’t actually all that well served by deployment as a quasi-wing-back. High and wide isn’t his best position on the pitch. He’s most effective, in general, when the game is happening in front of him, when he can see the patterns in front of and start spraying the ball around having drifted unattended into half-spaces in the midfield.

Of course, with thumping inevitability, Alexander-Arnold then created the first goal with a wicked cross from classic wing-back territory, smartly nodded home by a stooping Gordon to make a ball that arrived at an awkward height look like a tap-in. Well, a nod-in. We said before this window that while others had a chance to stake their claim to squad places during this extended break, Gordon had the chance to do something rather more, to ink himself in as a starter. So far, so good for a man currently living his very best life.

A second game-killing goal arrived with a sense of inevitability for Harry Kane. Who says he can’t score in the biggest games? Thomas Tuchel immediately rang the changes as the game drifted towards its inevitable outcome.

And let’s not pretend it’s anything other than an entirely satisfactory one, on paper. Three points and a clean sheet were the order of the day; we shouldn’t be too sniffy about how they arrived.

And yet… this was not a game to put a single one of the concerns around England’s defence to bed. The opposite, if anything.

There were still the sloppy errors that ruined a high-class overall effort against Spain – the only difference this time that they went unpunished. It was Marc Guehi and Nico O’Reilly against Spain. Guehi and Elliot Anderson today. Without wishing to be complete dicks about it we do have to ask: distracted by anything there, lads?

Even at 2-0 with the game seemingly done, the man-down Czechs still managed to conjure (and admittedly butcher) a three-on-three counter-attack, while only a tight offside flag halted another late breakaway for the hosts, a team intent on reinvention after a miserable World Cup.

James Trafford had only a couple of routine saves to make after a far heavier workload against Spain, but there was no compelling sense of a tightening up at the back from England’s rejigged back four.

Further forward, fears must grow for Bukayo Saka. He was the odd man out again in an otherwise lively and encouraging England attack. In what is perhaps the second most obviously predictable bombshell to hit football recently, it really does look like Mikel Arteta embarking on a policy in around 2023 of simply making Saka play absolutely all of the football has broken him in some really quite foundational way.

But it’s a win. Some big players put their hands up. Some fringe players staked a claim. It won’t live long in the memory. It may well be a rare England game that has to take second billing on tomorrow’s back pages. But it’s a win. It’ll do.