Mark Langdon: England's manager should be English

What is the point of international football?

It's something that gets asked more frequently these days as the club game dominates with every passing year and anyone brave enough to sit through 90 minutes of the goalless Nations League cracker between Liechtenstein and Gibraltar last week may well be pondering the same question.

There were nine shots, three on target, as the spoils were shared in the battle for supremacy in League D Group 1 and Gibraltar sit at the summit, ready for next month's winner-takes-all battle with San Marino. Gib were indebted to a last-gasp penalty save from goalkeeper Bradley Banda and should they gain promotion to Group C, the St Joseph's stopper will find himself known as the new Rock of Gibraltar.

If Banda goes for a night out he might struggle to avoid attention and it was the same for me on a trip to Gibraltar this year. On walking into the betting shop at Grand Casemates Square some random bloke asked where my friend and I worked and my immediate reaction was to ignore the question, only for a pal to blurt out "Racing Post". It was a schoolboy error but the fella was nice enough and the toughest question coming my way was "what's that Steve Palmer really like...?"

Later in the evening I was playing pool with a mate when somebody from the Gibraltar national pool team ruined the mood by demanding a frame, so if Banda's got any sense he'll keep his noggin down because his new-found fame could make him a magnet for all the waifs and strays, most of whom work in the betting industry.

Gibraltar's manager is former Uruguay international Julio Cesar Ribas and it's fair enough given the population is around 40,000 that the national team looked outside their own pool to find a boss. Their league is ranked 54th out of 55 by Uefa and the infrastructure is not in place to have a peaceful frame of pool, never mind find a manager to improve all aspects of Gibraltarian football.

England, ranked number one on club coefficients by Uefa and runners-up in each of the last two Euros, should be capable of better but made the decision this week to appoint Thomas Tuchel as the successor to Gareth Southgate.

Tuchel's arrival unquestionably means England have a better chance of winning next year's World Cup and for many people that is the end of the argument. However, without wishing to be jingoistic about all of this, the Three Lions should not be going overseas for a new coach. This has nothing to do with Tuchel being German; it has nothing to do with the boring debate on whether he sings a quite frankly awful national anthem, and it's not a dark day for English football as was portrayed on the back page of the Daily Mail. 

But it is embarrassing that the Football Association didn't feel they could trust an English person to be the England national team coach. Eddie Howe or Graham Potter would probably have done a decent job and if they were not up to it then tough luck. Do more to make English coaching better, don't just throw cash at it as we do in the club game.

International football for major nations should be a battle of our best against your best and if we don't have that, what exactly is the point of international football?

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