White’s return to international football has been over a year in the making.<\/p>\n
One of Tuchel’s first jobs upon his appointment as England head coach was to gauge how open White was to playing for his country again.<\/p>\n
White exiled himself from selection after a falling-out with assistant coach Steve Holland at the World Cup, which led to the right-back returning home.<\/p>\n
Southgate tried to provide an olive branch and approached then Arsenal sporting director Edu to find out if White would return to the England fold.<\/p>\n
We know White’s response.<\/p>\n
But Southgate and Holland’s departure after Euro 2024 changed the dynamic.<\/p>\n
In March 2025 – before Tuchel’s first game in charge – he said White had communicated that he was available for selection.<\/p>\n
Sources have told BBC Sport that Tuchel intended to select White for the games against Andorra and Senegal in May, but his selection did not materialise because of family reasons.<\/p>\n
In September a knee injury prevented White from being called up against Serbia and Andorra.<\/p>\n
White has played a peripheral role at Arsenal this season – Jurrien Timber is first-choice right-back – and injury has disrupted his campaign.<\/p>\n
But Tuchel has finally executed his plan. Time will tell if White was worth waiting for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"White’s return to international football has been over a year in the making. One of Tuchel’s first jobs…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491090,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-491089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491089\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}