Former Borussia Dortmund manager Thomas Tuchel has revealed one big lesson he learnt at the club that he's now carrying with him in the England job at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
The Three Lions come up against DR Congo in the Round of 32 tonight at the Atlanta Stadium looking to avoid joining the growing list of European casualties at the tournament.
Germany and the Netherlands have been the biggest upsets on the round thus far after losing out to Paraguay and Morocco, both in penalty shootouts.
Seeing this, Tuchel is aware of some misfortune he suffered in that situation while at Dortmund. Back in 2016, the then-BVB manager suffered a 4-3 shootout loss to Bayern Munich in the DFB Pokal finals.
As the match ended 0-0 even after 120 minutes, the showpiece headed into a shootout where Sven Bender and Sokratis Papastathopoulos missed their spot-kicks for Dortmund.
10 years later, that heartbreak is still vividly remembered by Tuchel, who has won just two penalty shootouts in his career across Dortmund, PSG and Chelsea from six attempts.
When asked by the press whether he's ready for another shootout at the FIFA World Cup with England, Tuchel responded by harking back to that fateful night in Berlin:
"“I’ll tell you a funny story. Not so funny for me. My first cup final in Germany with Dortmund in my first year, I play against Bayern and against Pep [Guardiola]. It was a nightmare because Bayern and Pep, from 120 possible points they had 130 in the season or something. It was a joke. We had the next-highest number of points and were second.said Tuchel
“We prepared everything in this match. I prepared everything. We needed to twist the tactics, and they twisted the tactics, and we twisted the structure and he twisted the structure, and it was like a fight and people got tired and it went into extra time. ""
Admitting that he didn't prepare for the prospect of a shootout in that cup final, the German further revealed:
"“Then the whistle went and I was just not prepared. I forgot to prepare for a penalty shoutout. So we ended up asking the players: ‘Do you want to shoot? Do you want to shoot? Do you want to shoot?’ And they were ready for it. They were: one, two, three, four, five, we go. And we were absolutely not ready. And we lost it.said the 52-year-old manager
A very painful experience and a big, big scar on me, because I felt really, really badly that I had let myself down. It was the first time. It will never happen again.""
With England now into the knockout stages, they could face a penalty shootout at some point into their campaign. Of the previous four attempts at the World Cup, they've won just once: a 4-3 victory over Colombia in the last-16 of the 2018 edition.
Add us as a preferred source on Google