"We will always have a scar, we will always feel pain and disappointment. But this is the way to move forward." Thomas Tuchel knows England's frustrating, much-criticised semi-final defeat to Argentina at the World Cup will hang over him and his team right through until the Euros in 2028 - and even beyond. But in Croatia on Saturday, a thumping 7-0 win was a performance and result to reinvigorate Tuchel's England project.
It was a historic scoreline: Croatia's heaviest defeat. No team had scored more than four goals away to them before. Of course, the Nations League is not the World Cup and this ageing Croatia side, a shadow of their great teams of the past, could not provide an elite examination.
But England's "complete" performance, as it was described by manager, players and pundits alike, is something to get behind again. Last week, the positives against Spain were clouded by defensive mistakes and a clear gap in quality; the win over Czech Republic was distorted by the first-half red card. The front four were electric and devastating.
Elliot Anderson and Alex Scott, on his first start, bossed the midfield battle against their far more capped counterparts. There was a horror miss from Mateo Kovacic at 3-0 but Croatia were limited to little else, with England's full-backs far busier creating chances than having to stop them. "When England are rampaging all over the pitch like this, winning back possession when they have no right to do so, passing forward at every opportunity and finishing ruthlessly, there is no better team in world football to watch," wrote Sky Sports News football correspondent Rob Dorsett from the press box.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player It was the best performance of the Tuchel era, and the England boss agreed. "It was a fantastic victory. It's an outstanding result, of course, and the performance underlying this result is just on the highest level, from the first minutes to the last," he said.
"The speed and the technical quality today and the hunger off the ball was on the very highest level." When Tuchel named his squad for this international break, he used his first press conference since the World Cup to insist on the message that this summer's tournament would increase his team's chances of success in the future. The "brotherhood" they built and experiences they shared in North America would be crucial in the next chapter, he explained. That assessment will have been difficult to swallow for many England fans at the time, with Tuchel's tactical decisions late on against Argentina and his subsequent criticism of English footballers' "DNA" still raw.
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