Ranking England’s largely depressing options to start at right-back against Mexico | OneFootball

We’ve searched high and low for an alternative but there isn’t one.

England are simply going to have to play a World Cup last-16 game against Mexico at the Azteca. There’s no way out of it.

And in that game they are going to have to play someone at right-back. Realistically, England will probably need at least two across the course of the game, given it’s being played at The Iconic Azteca Stadium, a venue whose elevated location and the fearsome record held there by Mexico (against, frankly, a lot of quite sh*t sides but never mind that now) has become the absolute number-one talking point for any entry-level football chat among work colleagues or at the school gates.

But what exactly are the options for England and Thomas Tuchel in what is very much now officially their Problem Position?

We reckon there are six. We’re not entirely happy about any of them. But here they are, nevertheless.

6. Trevoh Chalobah

Through precisely no real fault of his own, Chalobah finds himself somewhere near the top of the England World Cup Scapegoat Power Rankings due to Thomas Tuchel’s increasingly bizarre-looking decision to pick him, a centre-back, to replace the injured Tino Livramento, a right-back.

It’s a decision so curious that it’s made absolutely everyone in the country entirely forget about what Trent Alexander-Arnold’s defending sometimes looks like. It’s a decision that has propelled Tuchel himself right up the scapegoat lists, where he now sits just behind Jude Bellingham and Djed Spence and just ahead of Danny Murphy’s cat.

But we are where we are now, and Chalobah has played a handful of games at right-back over the years, as most centre-backs have at one time or anoother. He started there in precisely one Premier League game for Chelsea last season and was quietly moved inside to centre-back at half-time with the Blues 2-0 down at Leeds.

Probably not the route to go down, then, but that was true when Tuchel called him up so who knows?

5. Fit Jarell Quansah

Was fit enough to be named officially among the subs against DR Congo, but not fit enough to actually get changed into his match kit. We assume that was more because he wasn’t going to play than actually being physically unable to put some shorts and socks on. But still. Sub-optimal.

If indeed he is fit enough to play this time then he does become a contender, but to be honest it’s not a great instiller of confidence when you’re not even the number-one choice if the category was ‘Centre-back whose name sounds a bit like Quansah who could probably just about do a job at right-back’.

4. Ezri Konsa

We arrive now at the section of this really quite depressing list we’re calling ‘Well It’s Not Ideal But We Suppose We Don’t Actively Hate It’. No, it’s not the pithiest name.

The main reason we don’t actively hate it is itself pretty concerning, though; that being the fact Konsa’s form at centre-back has been so unnervingly ropey throughout the tournament for a player who previously had a well-deserved high score on the Won’t Let You Down Index that the normal fears here about unnecessary further disruption to the backline caused by moving a starting centre-back outside really don’t apply.

Has played right-back for Tuchel’s England before and been absolutely okay, and absolutely okay is at the top end of our demands and expectations now.

3. Djed Spence

We really do have a lot of time and a lot of sympathy for Spence. We’ll say about him what we always used to say about Aaron Wan-Bissaka: it must surely be easier to teach a really decent defender how to cross than to teach a really decent crosser how to defend.

Spence is absolutely fine at what strikes us as the far more difficult element of his job and that electric pace he possesses is (or should be) a huge asset going in both directions.

We maintain that while he was among those culpable for the DR Congo goal the other night he was no higher than about fourth or fifth on the list, and also that he spent the rest of the night defending almost entirely competently in a team where that could be said about no other defender.

But there is a reason that Tuchel spends whichever half of the game Spence is on his side of the pitch yelling at him constantly and memeably. It really does seem to be a mindset issue more than anything, but Spence’s contribution to England’s attacking play is always stymied by his overwhelmingly conservative instincts.

If we had a penny for every time against DR Congo that Noni Madueke cut back on to his left foot, passed the ball back to Spence who would take a touch, and then another, and then pass the ball backwards to Elliot Anderson then, well, we’d probably have a small handful of pennies. We wouldn’t be rich or anything. But the point is it happened quite a bit. We’d be able to buy a Freddo in 1997, is what we’re saying here.

Spence is a professional footballer. We are absolutely certain it’s worth him at least trying to cross the ball on some of those occasions.

He’s never going to be Trent, for good and bad, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. But with just a bit more willingness to attempt a cross now and then, or even just to make a run – he is very, very quick – that might pull a defender out of position and create a space for someone without Spence ever even having to receive the ball, he could surely quite easily be more effective than he is.

And that’s why Tuchel yells. Because of all England’s players in North America this summer, it’s Spence who seems to be most conspicuously making the easy stuff hard.

2. Declan Rice

Declan, we’re sorry. Declan’s hamstrings, we’re sorrier still. But we’re afraid we really might need you to spend a good hour running up and down the right flank at Azteca altitude. We’re sure it will all be fine.

There’s something undeniably amusing about the fact that Tuchel’s conspicuous decision to try and avoid the previous standard England tournament squad mistake of just trying to take all the good players and then shoehorn them into a team somehow may directly end up with him having to take all his remaining good players and then shoehorn them into a team somehow.

Rice at right-back is the closest thing England have at their disposal to Alexander-Arnold, and England looked so much sharper as an attacking team when he was filling in there by necessity in those desperate closing stages against DRC.

There’s no escaping the fact that there are knock-on benefits of what is undeniably a desperate and experimental move. We definitely don’t hate the idea of Bellingham dropping back into a deeper role from where he ran the game so effectively in Rice’s absence against Panama.

He is arguably an even greater attacking weapon when arriving late from deeper in the midfield with opposition defences less certain on whose responsibility he is, and it does allow his star attraction qualities to shine through.

The most significant downside really might be the very real risk that an hour doing this could cook a clearly red-zoning Rice once and for all. But that only matters if England win. Worrying about quarter-finals against Brazil or the Democratic Republic of Erling Haaland are very much concerns for another day that feels a very, very long way away now.

1. Fit Reece James

Thomas Tuchel’s assertion that nobody could have predicted Reece James picking up an unfortunate injury was surely the great man having a bit of fun with us all and riffing on that infamous Onion headline.

The alternative, that he genuinely believes relying on Reece James as your one and only acceptable specialist option at right-back for a tournament that finishes with five games in 19 days if you go all the way was a solid plan that has been deeply unfortunate to fall victim to happenstance, is too stupid to contemplate.

But if we’re doing this list, and 1200 words in we have to conclude that we are indeed doing that, then we have to acknowledge that if and when James is magically fit again then we would very much like him to a) be the right-back but also b) play like Reece James again please rather than whatever that nonsense was against Ghana.