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Nausea, cramps, shortness of breath. Time-lagged, unacclimatised, eyes bulging as the vertigo hits. Not to mention three times more likely to suffer unwanted swelling of the brain. Watching England play football at this World Cup has certainly been a physical trial at times. Not least for those back home hunkered around the screen, feeling the energy surge then sag again through the dead periods in Boston, New York and Atlanta.

And now we move on to the altitude of Mexico City, the Azteca, host nation energy and a beautifully pitched last-16 game, one of those occasions that seems to go beyond sport, to carry its own sense of something epic and gravitational, an emotional weather front about to break.

The World Cup has been a back-roads odyssey for England so far. Those four matches and 23 days have felt both weirdly interminable – can you actually remember a time when this World Cup was not happening? – but also like a campaign still smoking and juddering on the airstrip, waiting for lift-off.

Croatia were physically overwhelmed. Ghana were not. Panama took England down into a pit of pain. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were slick, fearless and a bit unlucky. Through all this the lurking feeling has been: OK, when will it start? No, I mean really start. When will it hit the groove? When do they need to actually be good?

Sunday Tomorrow in the Azteca is undeniably epic in outline and staging. The lights, the noise, the World Cup ghosts at the edge of your vision, the squat little man turning like an eel, Franz Beckenbauer, broken arm strapped to his chest, passing serenely into midfield. This is all authentically World Cup.

But for this England, right now, the Azteca is also a strange, bitty game. This is an occasion to get through, where, frankly, winning is all that matters, however it comes.

Thomas Tuchel’s team have been held up to the light across those four games in the US. The joins, the ragged edges, the hopeful first-fixes have begun to show. At times in the first half against the DRC England played like a team with its legs on the wrong way round, awkward in possession, somehow managing to be both clumped together and also outnumbered in every area.

There are too many best guesses here, broken threads and unsolved problems. Tuchel seems confused over his wide attackers. Understandably so: they’re confusing. The full-backs seem vulnerable. Jordan Pickford has begun to whirl about clapping his arms together, veering around his penalty area looking spooked and testy, like a riderless horse at the Grand National.

There is an urge to seek solutions to all this, to settle and find patterns. But not now, not for this one. England will scoot into Mexico at the worst possible time, too close to the game to acclimatise to 7,220 feet above sea level, too far away to simply raw-dog it and rush through before the comedown hits. They will face a nation consumed by the show, energetically committed to disrupting not just their sleep at the hotel (drum-kits, klaxons, fireworks) but every insurgent moment spent in the country.

Simply staying level and upright, non-culture-shocked, will be a major part of any thoughts of victory. Never mind, for now, recalibrating the timing of their inverted underlaps. This is not a moment to solve anything, to look for solutions, signs of deep progress. This is a day to get through, to accept that sometimes World Cups are what happens while you’re busy making plans.

For all that, one good and stabilising thing has now happened. A block has been manoeuvred into place. Who knows, it might just have its own intangible effect. This is about Tuchel.

Not, on this occasion, the encouraging revelation that there are entire Mumsnet threads devoted to finding him guiltily but undeniably attractive: proof, if proof were ever needed, of the enduring appeal of the gangly and boggle-eyed Germanic vampire type.

This is about the job, and about the sense of someone finally just about touching bottom. Whatever happens at this World Cup Tuchel is surely safe now. And this really wasn’t the case with 15 minutes to go in Atlanta and England facing one of their most disappointing tournament defeats. Lose there and the entire premise of the Tuchel appointment would have begun to fall apart.

The FA’s decision to hire Tuchel was always a little jarring on its own terms. Did they really understand who they were getting here? As much as Tuchel himself has enjoyed the rhythms of the job, the freedom to Lime bike around his favourite central London haunts, to hurl himself into the wired and mega-focused intensity of tournament life, which he clearly loves. It is still a slightly weird fit.

There was a general assumption at the time that this was some kind of tournament specialist, a knockout football master. The Covid summer Champions League win with Chelsea was masterful in that sense. But Tuchel has also lost as many one-off finals as he has won. He’s not a go-for-it-lads guy, a seat of the pants pragmatist. He’s a process man, a team-builder, a deep details fanatic, a coach who seems, in this sense, less not more suited to the slow march of international football, the need to fudge it, look the other way sometimes, cross your fingers and talk a team into existence.

In this context the widely trumpeted mission statement – where did this actually originate? – looks doubly stupid. This was: win this World Cup or die in the process. Take the team Gareth Southgate led to two finals and just add a gloss. Do some tactics. Keep it, but tweak it. Just do those elite manager things, whatever they may be.

Never mind that no one wins the World Cup to order. It’s the hardest task in sport, a complete non-guarantee. The real point is that football doesn’t work like this. Teams don’t work like this. You don’t simply polish the thing you find, inject your own independent magic dust, without repercussions or the need to reshape the whole thing.

Every elite coach makes their own team, sets their own tactical microclimate, their own emotional barometer. Particularly a process guy with his own fully-rounded intellectual brief. Chuck in the largely overlooked deep churn in personnel. Tuchel has lost, through form, fitness and age: Kyle Walker, Harry Maguire, Kieran Trippier, Jack Grealish, Cole Palmer and Phil Foden. Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka are being held together with string and brown paper right now. That’s an entire Gareth-era team out the door.

Add to this only 18 months in the job, pegged out around a run of episodic, low-key games. What kind of team is supposed to have emerged from this? Well, this one.

For all the talk of a golden hand of attacking talent, England’s main wide forwards at this World Cup have been Noni Madueke, Anthony Gordon and a maybe-this-time Marcus Rashford. The midfield still lacks, as ever, a genuine career defensive shield. England doesn’t make these players. Elliot Anderson is being asked to run a World Cup team from a standing start, to be the metronome, the brains and the pivot. Anderson is a very good player, but his career is all ahead of him. It’s a huge task at this stage.

The DRC were a useful lesson in this sense, a hard-honed team, veterans of four rounds of qualifying. They looked it too, coherent and well-grooved, bonded by something more than hope, buzzwords and a hastily imposed tactical plan.

With this in mind there is, for the first time, a small degree of freedom on Sunday. An exit at this stage would be underperformance in terms of rankings and expectation. But the optics mean the manager is probably safe even in defeat. The Football Association knows it isn’t going to get someone better now, with two years until the home Euros that will be a more genuine test of what Tuchel can build.

This is not to give him a pass. Lose and the bodged notes will start to look far more telling. The squad is undeniably weird. Foden and Palmer were left out on merit and fitness, exactly what has been demanded in the past. But Jordan Henderson’s presence in the midfield emotional support rabbit role still looks odd. Kobbie Mainoo may be too cold now, with four games gone, to come in at the hottest moments.

Clearly Tuchel has one very good, as yet unspoken reason for not selecting Trent Alexander-Arnold. He must do, because hard logic doesn’t explain it. The squad has space. No one’s defending is that bad. Tuchel will need to address this at some point, and all the more so in defeat.

On the plus side, England might find some clearer tactical air. The team are set up to run, based around speed and quick transitions. Faced with a low block it will eventually start to chew off its own elbow. And Mexico may actually come to attack. This would at least offer something new, a little space to effect the gameplan.

But wait. Not that. Not now. No solutions, or pieces falling into place. England just need to get through this, to swallow the rarefied air, let the atmosphere and the energy eat away at their hosts instead. Pragmatism. Corners, set pieces, Harry Kane. For now the rest can wait.