Tuchel is wrong about Cole Palmer, and this mess is his to own. On Friday he named his 25-man England squad for November's Nations League games against Croatia and Spain, left Palmer out alongside Phil Foden and Kobbie Mainoo, and then stood in front of reporters and turned a run of injuries into a story about a player who can't be bothered.
Here is what he said. "It counts when you are in camp and I just said it last time, he misses too many opportunities to impress. It was a long camp. It was two and a half weeks and the players and the boys who were in camp built something extraordinary throughout these weeks." And the line that gives the game away: "We are speaking now about a player that is not in camp... That's why the credit goes to them, the trust is for them. If you are in camp, this is your chance to impress."
That would land if Palmer had been ducking call-ups. He hasn't. Every one of his absences points at the same thing: fitness. He pulled out of the September camp with a minor injury and then started playing again for Chelsea the moment the break ended, turning out in all four of their league games before this camp. This time there isn't even an injury to point to. The England medical staff checked him this week and found him fit and ready to play. So Tuchel is leaving out a healthy, in-form attacker and calling it a standards issue.
That is the sleight of hand. "He misses too many opportunities to impress" is a sentence about character. A groin strain doesn't say anything about his character. When a manager quietly swaps the word "injured" for the word "unwilling," he is rewriting a medical record to win an argument, and the facts don't back him up.
A manager who lets his most gifted player drift in and out while everyone else grinds through two and a half weeks loses the dressing room fast, and the group that actually showed up has earned the right to keep their places. Reward the people who did the work. But that only holds if the absences were a choice, and they weren't. You can't build trust by benching a man for his body.
And this is the player he's doing it to. Palmer came off the bench for Kobbie Mainoo in the Euro 2024 final in Berlin and, minutes after walking on, stroked the equaliser past Spain to make it 1-1, England's one real route back into a game Oyarzabal won late. As of Friday's squad announcement he'd racked up five goals and three assists in eleven Chelsea appearances this season across competitions. That's the kind of footballer you build your team around.
Remember where England just were. They lost a World Cup semi-final to Argentina from a winning position last summer, Anthony Gordon putting them ahead in the 55th minute before Argentina scored twice late to win 2-1. That was a squad that ran out of players who could change a game at the exact moment it needed one. Palmer wasn't even in that squad, left at home over a flat club spell and injury worries. Now he's fit, scoring and creating, and still outside the tent.
Tuchel insists "the door is always open" and that none of this is personal. The practical effect is a freeze-out, and saying it isn't one doesn't change that.
England need a single point from their remaining two games this window to reach the two-legged quarter-finals in March, and if the trusted group delivers again, Tuchel gets to stand there and say he was right. Winning this window won't make the reasoning honest; freezing out your most dangerous attacker for getting hurt and calling it discipline confuses an attendance policy with a selection philosophy. England are the ones who'll pay for it.
