Tuchel has one big call left on his right wing, and it is not really about Noni Madueke. It is about whether he trusts Bukayo Saka’s Achilles to get through a World Cup opener against Croatia tonight. Saka says he is ready. His manager has spent a week sounding a lot less sure.
The Achilles problem that will not quite go away
Saka has been carrying this since the back end of the season. The Achilles flared up after Arsenal’s Carabao Cup final defeat to Manchester City, cost him the March internationals and seven club games, and never fully cleared. He came back for the run-in, helped Arteta finally land the title, then laboured through a Champions League final that Arsenal lost to PSG. Five starts in that closing stretch. One of them a full 90 minutes.
England have managed him the same way. He sat out the New Zealand friendly with the rest of the late-arriving Arsenal group, then got 27 minutes against Costa Rica and nothing more. Tuchel’s public line has been consistent and slightly ominous. This is the player they are still taking care of in training, the one who was playing through pain by the end of his club season.
Saka does not see it that way, or at least he is not saying so. Speaking from the camp in Kansas City on Monday, he flatly called himself ready to go and gently waved off the suggestion that he is short of full fitness. He described playing through it as the biggest gamble a player can take. He is taking it anyway.
Why the decision belongs to Tuchel
Here is the part the player cannot control. Tuchel is not picking a team for one night. England play Ghana in Boston on 23 June and Panama in New Jersey on 27 June, three group games in 11 days to open the tournament, and Saka is the one body in this squad the staff are openly nursing. Burn him out in Dallas and the cost lands later.
The fear Tuchel has hinted at is specific. Not whether Saka can play, but whether he can start and finish. A winger who has managed one full match in months is a very different proposition over 90 minutes against Croatia’s veterans than he is in a 27-minute cameo against Costa Rica.
What England lose if Saka sits
Plenty, and there is no point pretending otherwise. Saka is England’s best one-against-one threat on the right, the player who turns a tight game into a penalty or an assist out of nothing, and his 14 goals for the national team are not an accident. Croatia, even with a 40-year-old Modric still running their midfield, are exactly the kind of opponent you want him pinning back.
Madueke is the only natural alternative, and the realistic read is that he is a downgrade. Fresher legs and more direct, but less reliable with it. His outing on the right against Costa Rica was erratic enough that several of the predicted lineups doing the rounds have flipped back to Saka, on the logic that Tuchel cannot stomach the drop in quality. Others have Madueke in and Saka held back for later. Opinion is properly split.
A gamble that cuts both ways
Protect Saka and England open their World Cup with a weaker right side against the team that knocked them out in 2018. Start him and risk losing him for the games that matter more. Tuchel has built two years of work toward this opener, and the one decision he cannot delegate is the one his most dangerous attacker keeps insisting he has already made for him. So does Tuchel believe Saka, or does he believe what his own eyes saw at the end of the season?
