The grim reality for Thomas Tuchel is that a quarter of his World Cup preamble is now behind him. Two qualifying games disappeared, six to go.
Much of the good news starts and ends with the results. Two victories, two clean sheets. The rest is more nuanced. There has been a lot that we have seen earlier of English teams here at Wembley against limited opponents who sit down and nip and frustrate.
Too much football that was slow and linear. Too few cases when the pace was injected and the speed of the passing and exchanges is sufficiently accelerated to create space and openings and goals. England eventually got three against the 140th best team in the world, but they had to work and wait for two of them.
Tuchel seems to have an idea in his head of how he would like his England to play, at least during this qualifying phase. The messages from the New England head coach are consistent and revolves around established Premier League values and, in the structure of this game, something even more intrinsic English.
“Sometimes I am thinking of whether it is the right thing to play in a very traditional 4-4-2 as an English national team,” Tuchel said on Sunday.
“This is how I think about English football. Many crosses. Cross of half field. Two strikers on the field. So let's sort it out. '
It has been a special rhetoric, simply because it was so long ago that a coach in England said something like that. For years we try to convince ourselves that we have grown into European football paint, that we have finally caught up with everyone else. And now this, a request for pace and power and crosses it in the box.
On this occasion it was not overly successful. It had also not been to Albania on Friday.
But the strange truth of this was that Latvia could not really deal with the raw things. The corners and the crosses of deep. They had three central defenders in a back line of five who often lay on seven and none of them could lead the ball. They also had a keeper who could not always catch. England, if something, was guilty of the fact that they simply did not realize, to look at what stood for them and to hunt a clear weakness.
So this was, at least until the last phases, another bits-and-piece version where the broad players Marcus Rashford and Jarrod Bowen in particular tried their damn test to follow their instructions, but did not always succeed. Too much of English football was again in the middle and in traffic. While Tuchel stood in his cap and his Mac on the touchline, he must long for the width that this game may have just stretched.
He had asked in advance. In fact, he had demanded it and tried to deliver England. It was a shame that Anthony Gordon was a hip injury back in Newcastle. The Liverpudlian is the Throwback wide player of England, a linear runner who lives for directness and open green spaces.
This is not the game of Rashford and that has never been. The 27-year-old is fast, but is preferred to come in from his flank in search of short steps and corners. He is not a particularly natural crosser of the ball.
Bowen, Van West Ham, was something more progressive here, helped occasionally and usefully through full-back Reece James on the overlap.
Sometimes the idea took place that Rashford might try too hard, something that has probably not been said about him for a while. Certainly not in Manchester, where his parent club with some curiosity in Aston Villa in Aston Villa has seen.
It was clear that Rashford had listened to Tuchel at least. He may not have played if Gordon had been fit, but a second chance had presented himself and occasionally he seemed to be a bit digested by a clear desire to take it. Instructions are all very good at football, but they can also cloud the spirit of a player. Get the instinct away from an attacker such as Rashford and you run the risk of removing half of the player.
During his best years – of which there may be more – Rashford was a free runner and a free thinker. Here he sometimes seemed quite too fixed with offering England of the qualities that Tuchel had asked. He occasionally investigated his entire back and occasionally came up with the answer to the puzzle. But with Latvia who was deeply and defended with a bank of five and often more, more often or not another chestnut shirt was prepared to get in the way.
Eventually England benefited when the game was broken. Morgan Rogers, from Aston Villa, was productive. Jude Bellingham was forever busy, but should probably have been sent away.
Rashford and Bowen changed flanks in the second half. Then Bowen was replaced by Ebereechi Eze, who scored. In the meantime, Phil Foden got a run on 10, his favorite position.
Two games in the Tuchel era, and his England look like a bit of a puzzle. This is not necessarily a surprise and certainly not his fault. Time would always be his enemy during this crazy line to the starting line of the World Cup. The reality is that we may not learn to know how good, or otherwise, his team is until they are there.
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