00:00England's games against Argentina, France and Spain have shown that, under Tuchel, we are making progress.
00:06Now hear me out, England's record against the top 10 teams in recent years has been, to be blunt, very
00:11bad.
00:11We all know that. This was not going to be an overnight fix, where all of a sudden we batter
00:15these teams.
00:16Our squad is probably not as good as other top nations, our experience definitely isn't as good, and our mentality
00:21is the worst of the lot.
00:23The Argentina game was 70 minutes of very good tournament football, followed by an implosion.
00:28That game has been dissected to death, but part of the reason it hurt so badly was, A, because we
00:32got so close, which is good,
00:34and B, it was clear to everyone what went wrong, which I think is also good.
00:38The France game is difficult to take too seriously, but we won against a good team, and played some brilliant
00:43football at times.
00:44We broke a hoodoo, it was our second best World Cup finish ever.
00:47The Spain game, again, frustrating, but Spain win that game because we missed a penalty and gave them the ball
00:52twice on the edge of our own box.
00:54Being able to point to clear individual lapses of concentration as reasons we lost is, for me, kind of a
00:59good thing.
01:00It's not this intangible, we weren't good enough, we just couldn't get the ball, we couldn't get out.
01:05Sure, each of those teams had us on the ropes at times, but the same goes in reverse.
01:09England's confidence against the best teams will have grown.
01:12This is not a team that will simply buckle against quality anymore.
01:15I'm an optimist, and maybe sometimes deluded, but this team is making progress.
01:20Let's hope it's done in time for 2028.
01:22All right.
