The beer cups are not yet being hurled. Tabloid editors have not yet decided which root vegetable would Photoshop best on to his face. Helicopters are not yet being dispatched to take aerial shots of his house. We are still probably at least two defeats away from our first second world war-themed front page.
But perhaps in hindsight, this was the week Thomas Tuchel finally became the England manager. The night he finally felt the weight of the hairshirt. Finally glimpsed the depth and darkness of a job in which all defeats are humiliations, where the default temperature is set permanently to “scorn”, where every decision is a betrayal of somebody, somewhere.
