{"id":697882,"date":"2026-07-18T05:06:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T05:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/697882\/"},"modified":"2026-07-18T05:06:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T05:06:09","slug":"world-cup-2026-england-coach-thomas-tuchel-defends-semi-final-tactics-in-argentina-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/697882\/","title":{"rendered":"World Cup 2026: England coach Thomas Tuchel defends semi-final tactics in Argentina loss"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Asked about how he viewed the last 35 minutes of the game having had time to reflect, Tuchel said he felt &#8220;the same way &#8211; that we were too passive&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;If you&#8217;re asking if I regret my decision, if this is the question, then I don&#8217;t regret my decisions,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I felt that the momentum switches in the match. And I tried to help my team&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I took several decisions, trusting my instinct, my intuition, my experience, trusting my competitiveness, and I took the decision in order to help the team and get the result. We didn&#8217;t get the result.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;So I take, of course, the responsibility and for these decisions. I would regret if I didn&#8217;t help. I would regret if we didn&#8217;t react.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Tuchel said he was not willing to engage &#8220;in this kind of game&#8221; over who is to blame.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;No problem,&#8221; he said. &#8220;This is the deal that you sign up for, but I will not engage. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;For me, there is no-one to blame.\u2029If you need someone to blame, I take the responsibility. I&#8217;m the head coach.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Asked why England&#8217;s record goalscorer Kane played so deep in the latter stages, he said: &#8220;What do you mean? Like in the last 30 minutes?<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Why we defended in a deep block. Well, that&#8217;s what you do if you defend in a block. We were not active enough.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Tuchel said Argentina had &#8220;played with a lot of momentum after our goal&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;They had a lot of offensive changes, and a lot of offensive positions,&#8221; the 52-year-old added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We could not stop the crosses, and we could not stop the runners into the box.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;So we decided to play a back five, to have more width in the field, to be closer to the guys who cross.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We just became too passive, and Argentina, by the way, found another gear and they found the total flow.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We played in the semi-final against the reigning world champions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We were 85 minutes 1-0 up. We played against the best player in the world, and we lost 2-1, which is painful.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Tuchel was asked if he had studied data which showed England&#8217;s physical performance levels against Argentina were lower than the DR Congo game in the same stadium earlier in the tournament.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He said &#8220;even if we don&#8217;t want to admit it because it feels like an excuse&#8221;, the Mexico  game with 10 men in the altitude of the Azteca Stadium and the heat against Norway in Miami &#8220;cost us more than we maybe thought&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;The players literally gave everything physically [in] every single match. If you see this data drop, there must be a reason behind it, because the motivation was through the roof,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Asked about how he viewed the last 35 minutes of the game having had time to reflect, Tuchel&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697883,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-697882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697882","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=697882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}