‘Typical England’ flatter to deceive – so why can’t they reproduce club form for the Three Lions?

Football isn’t a predictable sport beyond a few certainties and playing unimaginative, boring football doesn’t always prevent success.

Which is just as well for England because if the team that played Uruguay was our second string, it just illustrated, in contradiction to common assumptions, just how shallow England’s actual depth is as the fringe players failed to impress. Even though we’re told time and again how England has such strength in depth . They weren’t bad, as such, just not sparkling, exciting or creative.

Maybe it’s an argument for playing less football, so they’re not as knackered. But that means less money for club, execs, transfers, agents and players’ wages and in an era which promotes and advocates for greed, when did any of them ever actively campaign for more sensible wages?

I’d love to think Thomas Tuchel created it as an elaborate exercise to show the limitations of options actually available because players are so talked up on their club form, but shorn of non-English teammates and put with 10 other Englishmen, you often see a different side to them.

Whether it’s pressure, exhaustion or just inadequacy, on Friday, as is all too typical, players who impress at club level failed to reproduce that form , let alone excel. Whatever they’d done in training, it can’t have involved football.

Obviously they have no experience of playing together and that must play a big part, but that was an eye-melting non-football game with some running around, sometimes even with the ball.

It was a poor National League-style game that made you question your life’s choices while watching.

Uruguay were dirty blighters and likely would have finished with eight in the fifth tier. And the referee wasn’t even good enough for the National League.

England offered terrible entertainment and seemed bereft of ideas. Was it even football? It certainly wasn’t in the same postcode as football. What had we done to deserve this abomination? Was it an endurance test of some sort? If it was designed by Tuchel to definitely exclude players from the final squad, it succeeded.

Write it off as a meaningless friendly if you want but this was a chance to play your way into a World Cup squad . Didn’t look that way, did it?

Maybe it just showed the level we’re at and that we have little stellar quality in depth beyond the first team.

The constant ‘this is really good, please pay for it’ Premier League hype is such that it leads to constant overrating.

Hopefully the first team will be markedly better. But forget this idea of strength in depth, especially at this time in the season, it’s little more than marketing hype. Clearly, it doesn’t actually exist.

That’s OK but let’s not forget this when the league resumes and resist that overrating. If you watch any European football you’ll already know it’s all far better entertainment than Our League usually is, this season especially, and Friday won’t have surprised you.

Even at this level, it looked as if they were relying on dead-ball situations and the crowding of the penalty area as usual. It was fitting that the goal from a yard out should have fallen to an Arsenal player in a goalmouth scramble. A victory for the Premier League meat-grinder theocracy.

If the first team adopts a ‘Premier League style’ too we’ll see how successful deploying beef wardrobes to grapple with the smaller boys makes them. Ben White was booed, possibly for his fluorescent shade of orange and his ‘I’ve got head lice’ shaved above the ear haircut.

Games like Friday’s make me realise that we’ve barely moved on in half a century at this level. You could have seen a performance like Friday’s any time in the 70s, 80s and 90s and the chinstrokers would have said “why can’t they reproduce their club form?”

This once reached the mad situation of picking six of the Liverpool team in 1977. It made little difference. And there was no excuse then, you couldn’t point at non-English players as supporting English talent and making them look good.

It was the change of context that seemed to make them worse. That was quite profoundly what Gareth Southgate changed for a while, and the first team’s performance will show us if Tuchel has managed to mirror that. On this showing it seems not.

England’s team has rarely attracted dispassionate critique, forever stuck between huge over-rating or under appreciation. Every team for 60 years has suffered from being rated as brilliant or total rubbish, whereas the truth has always been somewhere in between.

At least until Gareth who was nonetheless criticised for winning a lot but not in the expected style, by people who didn’t seem to even take joy in reaching a final. Where the notion of an  ‘expected style’ came from, I don’t know. Are England supporters unusually wedded to the aesthetics of the game while inserting fireworks into their bottoms?

The best chance remains an easy draw and one good performance to win it. They must prove that they have the imagination and guile to beat the best Japan side in a generation or more who didn’t look all that v Scotland.

But Friday knocks your confidence that they can break the ‘beat the small countries, lose against the best’ tradition established over decades. If they can’t, then it’s time to stop thinking players are better than they are, shrug and say ‘typical England’ once more.