World Cup chaos could be concern for England after Croatia win

There is a scene in the final Lord of the Rings film where one of the antagonists is surveying a city upon which he and his forces are about to launch an attack.

“Fear,” the character, a grotesque orc called Gothmog, if you’re interested in the details, growls. “The city is rank with it.”

Swap city for country and a Tolkienesque villain for something equally terrifying and unwieldy in the World Cup and you could be talking about the apprehension anyone in England feels at the start of any major tournament. 

England supporters are well accustomed to the sweaty palms, nightmarish visions and elevated heart rates while watching their nation.

But the players showed that they were not immune to that fear either.

Harry Kane’s first fluffed penalty was a shocker; a nervous, tentative poke that was easily saved by Dominik Livaković.

Livaković had stepped off his line, though, forcing a retake. That was enough for Kane to put whatever nervousness aside and slam the ball home with his customary flourish.

It wasn’t enough to settle the nerves completely, though.

England was pegged back by a thunderous drive by Martin Baturina and, even after Kane had added another with a sumptuous header, Petar Musa responded with a goal just before half time.

Thomas Tuchel wasn’t best pleased.

“I think we were too passive after we scored,” the England coach said.

“We already straight away feeling we have something to lose, then we went backwards, which is absolutely not our character.”

Nerves?

“We struggled a bit [to] get the nerves out of our system,” Tuchel admitted.

“They punished us twice, but I love the reaction.

“It’s always about the reaction. Mistakes happen. We play against a good opponent, so the reaction was excellent.”

When all is said and done, England got its World Cup campaign off to a winning start, but it may be difficult to get a real feel about what that game proved, if anything.

Raucous attacking play, alarmingly fragile defence — this was less like a tactical chess match and more like a helter-skelter, first-person shooter console game.

Coaching England must be like existing in a curious world, subject to a 360-degree, goldfish bowl of attention, all the while dangling on the edge of a precipice, staring into imminent disaster with knives periodically poking and prodding you closer to the edge.

Any wrong move — and even the odd right one — will result in the knives being drawn and having the fury of a rabid popular press unleashed upon you.

Tuchel, for his part, has already proven that he doesn’t care what the press thinks.

His remit is not that of Gareth Southgate, who was forced to unite a nation behind a flailing and failing team that had become as big a chore to follow as it apparently was to play in.

Tuchel was given one task: to win the World Cup.

If England plays the way it did at the start of the second half, when it dominated Croatia for the best part of 25 minutes, denied repeated goals only by a pick-n-mix of saves from Livaković, it could have every chance.

“Credit to the manager,” Kane told reporters after the match.

“The manager gave a speech at half time just to say, ‘look, if we lose, we lose it our way’, and I think you saw that in the way we came out in the second half.

“We went full gas and they couldn’t live with it.

“That’s the level we have to set for every game.”

What is this Bazball-eque statement? Is England truly going to go hell-for-leather at every opportunity and defence be damned? Of course not.

But the four goals that England scored while playing a flowing, attacking style of football rarely seen in a team bearing the three lions on their chest suggested that England will be well stocked going forward.

The intensity the Three Lions brought to the start of the second half was superb, Jude Bellingham’s goal a perfect example of what he can do and why he has to start, while his chance that was well saved a minute or so later offered an equally compelling train of thought.

But when England made changes in the second half, the trio of attackers that came — Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Morgan Rogers — all combined for Rashford to score their fourth.

It’s a nice problem to have.

“Without the ball, we went a little bit more aggressive,” Kane noted of England’s second-half display.

“The intensity that we went at, that’s our biggest strength.”

The point is, though, that England was open at the back, far too open for a team that has designs on winning the whole shebang in New York on July 20.

That looseness was unexpected and unusual: England conceded as many first-half goals in this game as it had in the first halves of its previous 21 matches combined.

Croatia had two shots on target in its first half and scored with both. That’s a problem.

And while as much focus was put on Tuchel leaving attacking players like Phil Foden, Cole Palmer and Morgan Gibbs-White at home, the British press has also noted that reliable defensive stars didn’t make the cut either.

The defenders he did pick are not all in their prime either: John Stones started just five Premier League games last season and is currently without a club. He came off late against Croatia, setting those nerves jangling again that a defence that was mercilessly ripped open repeatedly in the closing stage will once again need patching up.

Tino Livramento already left camp this week due to injury and was replaced by Trevoh Chalobah.

Luke Shaw, Lewis Hall, Myles Lewis-Skelly and Harry Maguire were all left at home for very reasonable, pragmatic reasons that the majority can understand.

But such a shaky defensive display will alarm supporters for whom fear of England’s failure hangs over them like a bad smell during tournaments and offers the waiting press the excuse they need to unleash their attack dogs.

England has two more chances to iron out its deficiencies before a potential trip to the Azteca looms, should results go a certain way in this spider’s web of a tournament layout.

Will the full press work in 30-degree heat in Mexico’s capital? It’s unlikely.

One wonders then, how much fear the fans — and their defensively vulnerable side — can take.