At one of my first Cub Scout meetings as a kid, our pack leader – known as Akela – voiced his displeasure after discovering that some of the boys had spilled paint all over the bathroom sink. Like his namesake from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Akela was a stern and grizzled man who expected both virtue and discipline from his Cubs.
When Akela demanded to know who was responsible for the mess, nobody stepped forward. It was at that point that one of the other adult leaders encouraged me to go and apologise. Although I wasn’t responsible for the spillage, I had been with the group of boys who did it.
After summoning up the courage, I approached our pack leader and told him that I was sorry for the mess. “Are you the one that did it?” he interrogated me.
“No, but I was in the bathroom when it happened, and I’m sorry that I was involved.”
A few minutes later I found myself standing in front of the entire Cub pack, with Akela praising me for having the bravery to come forward and apologise. I don’t remember everything he said, but he expressed his appreciation for my willingness to take responsibility, and he proceeded to rebuke the other boys for being put to shame by the smallest person in the room.
While I can’t take much credit for how my eight-year-old self acted on that occasion, I had reason to be reminded of these events when England suffered another agonising football defeat last week, this time to sworn rivals Argentina in the World Cup semi-final. I watched the game with my family, and the result left me as disappointed and frustrated as the next fan. But in the aftermath of the defeat, it was saddening to see so many instances where that disappointment and frustration turned into something altogether uglier: the need to find someone to blame.
Within minutes of the final whistle, media pundits and armchair coaches found their necessary scapegoat in England’s manager, Thomas Tuchel. Overnight, the man who had been celebrated as a national hero was morphed into the archvillain whose tactical blunders were single-handedly responsible for England’s misfortune. “This one was almost all on Tuchel,” vented the BBC’s chief football writer. If only Tuchel hadn’t been such a colossal idiot, then surely (surely!) England would have achieved the spot in the final that it so obviously deserved.
On the face of it, these criticisms were puzzling. Already on Wednesday night it was clear that, under Tuchel’s leadership, England had achieved her most impressive World Cup result since 1966. The last time we reached the semi-final was in 2018 under Gareth Southgate. But Tuchel’s squad had to play (and win) an extra knockout game compared to 2018, and the fixtures England faced in this World Cup were significantly tougher than those we encountered eight years ago. In the round of 16, we prevailed 3–2 against Mexico while playing at high altitude in their home stadium, the Azteca. And we did this despite going down to 10 men in the 54th minute.
Then, in the quarter-final, we beat Norway 2–1 in extra time. The game was played in Miami in 33°C heat, with the heat index over 40°C due to the relative humidity. By the time we reached the semi-final, we were not only physically drained, we had also travelled some 5,700 miles over the course of the tournament. For context, Argentina had travelled 3,500 miles, and France just 2,400.
Having overcome all these challenges, we arrived in Atlanta to face La Albiceleste. There our World Cup dreams ended in a heartbreaking 2–1 defeat. Immediately, the pundits and social media critics began pontificating on how Tuchel’s strategic blunders were the sole reason for England’s defeat. He had made the wrong substitutions and played too defensively, we were told, and thus he was squarely to blame.
It didn’t seem to matter to these critics that we had narrowly lost to the reigning world champions and winners of the Copa América, a team which possesses, in Lionel Messi, arguably the greatest player in the history of the sport. As far as the mob was concerned, none of this was of consequence. Nor, apparently, did it occur to anyone that maybe our players just weren’t good enough, or maybe Argentina were the better team. Instead, we needed someone to blame, and we demanded blood.
It’s a familiar story, one that is as old as humanity itself. When God asks Adam what he’s done, Adam blames his wife, Eve. When Eve, in turn, is confronted, she blames the serpent. Similarly, when the Lord confronts Cain over his crime, the murderer seeks to absolve himself of responsibility: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Even Aaron, after building a golden calf for the faithless Israelites, seeks to shift the blame: the people made him do it; it was their fault, not his.
None of this is to suggest that Tuchel is the perfect football manager. Like the rest of us, he is flawed, and he makes mistakes. But it says something about how pagan our society has become when every time something goes wrong we feel the need to conduct a public lynching in which somebody is made to pay the price because we didn’t get the result we wanted. Just this week we’ve seen this pattern playing out in our politics – Andy Burnham is the UK’s seventh prime minister in 10 years – and we’ve seen it in our football as well.
For his part, Tuchel has done an admirable job of rising above the petty finger-pointing. As he explained in his post-match press conference: “I will not engage in this kind of game. Because for me, there is no one to blame. If you need someone to blame, I take the responsibility.” With these sentiments, Tuchel displays a profoundly Christian intuition. It is good to take responsibility for our actions, but blaming people every time they make a mistake or fall short of perfection is not the way of the Gospel.
As a nation, we must therefore learn to cut some slack for our football managers, our politicians and our neighbours more generally. While we’re at it, we might also thank Thomas Tuchel for his impressive accomplishment. With our exhilarating 6–4 third-place play-off win over France this past Saturday, we officially achieved our best World Cup result in 60 years.
That doesn’t sound so bad.
