{"id":540970,"date":"2026-07-09T12:29:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T12:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/540970\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T12:29:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T12:29:08","slug":"john-stones-jokes-shoulder-fine-after-prank-on-england-boss-thomas-tuchel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/540970\/","title":{"rendered":"John Stones jokes shoulder fine after prank on England boss Thomas Tuchel"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was one of the viral moments from England’s 3-2 victory over Mexico.<\/a><\/p>\n

A glimpse inside the Three Lions’ changing room showed manager Thomas Tuchel clapping along to the post-match tunes, before halting his celebrations in concern as Declan Rice flags that defender John Stones has injured his shoulder.<\/p>\n

Or so the boss thinks.<\/p>\n

But Stones, who’d been holding his shoulder and flexing his arm in apparent discomfort, then starts pumping his fist towards the ceiling as the drop kicks in – to cheers from his team-mates and the obvious relief of Tuchel.<\/p>\n

A bouncing Tuchel then pogos over to the 32-year-old to give him a hug and a viral moment is born, clocking up more than 40m views on social media.<\/p>\n

“It’s feeling better now, it’s feeling better – it has its ups and downs,” joked Stones when asked about his shoulder during an interview with England’s in-house media.<\/p>\n

The prank came after midfielder Jordan Henderson suffered a freak injury as he fell while jumping over the advertising hoardings following the match.<\/p>\n

Stones added: “I tried to keep a straight face as I was doing it because I saw he [Tuchel] was concerned and thinking, ‘has he actually hurt himself?’.<\/p>\n

“Especially after what Hendo had just done outside, he didn’t know what was going to come but it was good vibes in there.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t think it would get that much traction to be fair.”<\/p>\n

Stones, who started England’s opening 4-2 win against Croatia and made a last-minute appearance in the 2-1 win over DR Congo, came on with just over half an hour to play against Mexico when winger Bukayo Saka was sacrificed following Jarrel Quansah’s red card.<\/p>\n

England play Norway in the quarter-finals<\/a> in Miami on Saturday (22:00 BST).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was one of the viral moments from England’s 3-2 victory over Mexico. A glimpse inside the Three…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540971,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-540970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}