Seán Maigh
England reached a World Cup semi-final on Saturday night, and the manager’s first move was to lodge a complaint. The Three Lions came from behind to beat Norway 2-1 in extra time, Jude Bellingham’s double carrying England into just their third World Cup semi-final since 1966, in South Florida heat and humidity that had reached 33 degrees by the start of the warm-up. Cue the open-top bus fantasies, the dubious flight bookings, the nation’s dads weeping into their lager. Instead, the sharpest contest of the evening kicked off after the final whistle: one man with a microphone versus two men with grievances.
The man with the microphone was Gabriel Clarke, ITV’s touchline veteran, rushed pitchside to catch Thomas Tuchel while the sweat was still drying. Clarke is nobody’s work-experience lad: he joined ITV Sport in 1991, has roved with England at every major tournament from the 2006 World Cup to this one, and has been named the Royal Television Society’s Sports News Reporter of the Year three times. He is also the son of Alan Clarke, the director of Scum, Made in Britain and The Firm — a man who made dramas about British institutions coming apart at the seams. On Saturday, the son simply held a microphone up while one did it live.
Tuchel’s assessment of his newly minted semi-finalists boiled down to this: they were not very good. “I’m not happy with the performance,” he announced, before itemising the sloppiness, the tactical mistakes, the lack of speed, and concluding that England had been fortunate. Managers usually save this material for a locked dressing-room door. Tuchel delivered it to the cameras with the win still warm.
Then Clarke asked about mentality, and the manager went up like a two-bar fire. Tuchel insisted there was no mentality problem whatsoever — this squad’s mentality was so abundant that “You can bottle it up and sell it” — and that the trouble was purely the quality of the football.
One wreck was apparently not enough. Clarke then relayed the manager’s criticism to Bellingham without providing any of the surrounding explanation, and the 23-year-old, having emptied the tank to score twice in a second successive knockout tie, shrugged: “Yeah well, whatever”, before pointedly redirecting his appreciation towards the players who had put in the shift. The aftershocks kept coming. Asked in a later interview whether he agreed with Tuchel’s verdict that England had been lucky, Bellingham offered a flat refusal to comment, and later still mused of his manager’s critique: “Maybe he doesn’t know what it’s like to play in those conditions.”
The punditocracy, naturally, split along predictable lines. In the ITV studio, Gary Neville declared “I love both interviews”, Roy Keane praised the honesty of manager and player alike, and Wayne Rooney sided with Tuchel’s right to challenge his players publicly. Others reached for the whistle: Sports Illustrated’s Grey Whitebloom called the whole feud manufactured, noting that Clarke never mentioned Tuchel had also lavished praise on Bellingham in the very same interview. Ken Early in The Irish Times observed that Clarke had been cast as a villain out to divide the camp, and mounted the defence: putting one man’s words to another is the basic raw material of post-match journalism — and nobody can deny the question revealed something.
So: a stitch-up, or the job done properly? Either way, what unfolded was a car crash — metal, glass, two national treasures exchanging paint at speed on live television. But let us be honest about why the whole country slowed down to look. The post-match flash interview is normally beige wallpaper, a conveyor belt of full-credit-to-the-lads. Here, for once, the format did precisely what it exists to do: it caught two men before the media training could be reapplied, and what came out was friction you could warm your hands on. England now march on to a semi-final against reigning champions Argentina, trailing this soap opera behind them like a wedding-car exhaust.
It was a car crash of an interview. That is not the complaint. That is the review.