Jude Bellingham brace covers up faults for England boss Thomas Tuchel

SAVED BY THE BELL: Jude Bellingham is greeted by manager Thomas Tuchel after being substituted during Saturday’s World Cup quarter-final at the Miami Stadium. Pic: Martin Rickett/PA

Among the many technological advances which have proven dismal failures at this World Cup, some quite literally getting in the way of the game, FIFA’s Media app can be considered a qualified success.

It houses every press man and woman’s match tickets, mixed zone passes, schedules for the bus shuttles which range from helpful (Dallas) to hard work (Miami) to horrific (Boston) and various other key information.

It also has a day-by-day calendar which in the early stages of this 48-team circus was stacked to the gills with open training sessions and player huddles and host city stadium tours. Now it has thinned out considerably. 

Sunday’s calendar featured just five entries, one of them a farewell press conference by the Swiss delegation.

Beside an icon of the St. George's Cross, the diary entry was as follows: England Rest Day, All Day. 

Well deserved. Perhaps badly needed too. 

But there’s a small bit of you that wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen the FA hastily wheel out one of the lads to address the elephant in the recovery room with some light-hearted ‘That’s Jude and Thomas. They care so much’, throwing in a Lampardian transition or two, a flick of bants and we all move on. 

It would be a fine job for Jordan Henderson, who has the prop of a red and white arm cast to bring to bear.

But no, England looked set for an all-day rest day, leaving the peculiar leftovers from Saturday’s sweat-soaked quarter-final victory over Norway out there in the still-sticky Miami air to be picked over.

What did it all say about England? It helps to go back to what was actually said.

For Thomas Tuchel you almost didn’t need the volume on. His body language is so fluent it does most of the work for him. 

Tuchel's two minutes of exasperation, not just with Gabriel Clarke but with so much of Saturday’s events was written in every shrug, stare at the floor, pursed lip, throw-up of the hands. Drained of almost every emotion and drop of sweat, Tuchel still got everything right.

“We made life very, very difficult for ourselves,” he told ITV’s Clarke, who did the rest of us and perhaps his country too some service with his post-match work. “The result is fantastic… but I’m not happy with the performance — in every sense. The commitment was there but…It was sloppy, a lot of technical mistakes, not fast enough, not repetitive enough. We were lucky today.” 

They were beyond lucky. England were blessed. Blessed to have Bellingham turn in such a force-of-nature display that it covered up all of the above failings, and more besides. 

It helped cover up the worst display at this tournament by England’s other totem, Harry Kane making more of a dent on Clément Turpin’s eardrums with his constant whingeing than any impact on an ultimately strange contest.

A seismic semi-final against Argentina awaits but not for the first time, Tuchel’s own selections and initial substitutions didn’t work in Miami. Noni Madueke, starting over Bukayo Saka, was a holy show on the right wing. Abysmal. 

Declan Rice was physically out there for the first 45 of 120-plus minutes but was a husk of himself. 

Anthony Gordon, so impressive in the two previous knock-out games, never got into this contest. 

Neither Saka, nor Eberechi Eze, both half-time replacements, changed the momentum which was all Norway’s way. 

But they did enough to stay in it, Elliot Anderson the lone resistance to Martin Odegaard’s heroics in midfield. In some key moments John Stones stepped up just enough.

It was an exercise in hanging tough until Bellingham would intervene again. 

The 23-year-old’s post-match intervention were just as compelling.

"Whatever, whatever,” Bellingham said, shaking his head when Clarke told him of Tuchel’s complaints. “It’s difficult out there. It’s a tough shift. My thoughts and appreciations go to all the players who were out there, who put in a great shift.” 

Even with a few gulps of conditioned air in the changing rooms, the mahtchwinner who’d moved level with Kane on six tournament goals, didn’t demur: “Maybe [Tuchel] doesn’t know what it’s like to play in those kinds of conditions against Erling Haaland, Odegaard, Nusa, Sorloth.” 


That felt like a more direct poke at a tender spot for Tuchel, who faced similar barbs about his lack of playing pedigree when his Bayern Munich tenure went down in flames.

If the image of an English flag opposite an Argentine one brings us all back to other Three Lions eras the inescapable image of David Beckham on the giant screens at Miami Stadium did likewise. 

If Tuchel’s 2026 odyssey had been missing that key piece of campaigns past — a superstar psychodrama — well, now it has one.

It doesn’t come out of thin air, either. We’re just a year removed from the remarkable tone of Tuchel’s revelation that his mother found Bellingham’s on-field attitude “repulsive”. 

As recently as November, the Daily Mail ran its all-caps ‘Leave Jude At Home’ back page, a mortification then and even more so now. 

The spurning of Phil Foden and Cole Palmer have faded from view the deeper England have gone but some of that debate centred on Bellingham’s place too.

The idea that Tuchel went overboard on Saturday night feels absurd. 

England had got out of jail thanks to Norwegians butchering their best chances, some highly debatable VAR and on-field decisions going England’s way and a couple of subs and switches — Djed Spence superb and Reece James belatedly freeing Bellingham to roam again, Dan Burn’s traction engine head a help — working eventually. (Tuchel’s trust in Kobbie Mainoo would appear particularly low.) 

England have got to Messi’s doorstep with grit trumping guile. 

Tuchel knows such psychological strengths will face their sternest test in Atlanta. 

Imagine Cristian Romero’s thought processes as the semi-final approaches? Tuchel was most animated when Clarke briefly got the wrong end of the stick.

“No. This is pure mentality,” he protested. “You can bottle it up and sell it.” 

Maybe, much like Saturday’s contest now being the kind England no longer lose, English psychodramas have fundamentally changed too. This episode could all be a positive to fire Bellingham up even more for Wednesday’s mission — getting to a first final since ’66. 

But when so many other things aren’t working for Tuchel, it also feels a risk to potentially tamper with the one thing that was. Let’s all take that all-day rest day and see.