CALL UPS
Djed Spence Got the England Call and I've Seen This Film
I have watched this film, the one where a Spurs full back gets the call up, we all get misty at the badge, and then Thomas Tuchel names him on the bench for two dead rubbers and the nation moves on. I am not doing the lap of honour this time. I am standing by the turnstile with my coat on, waiting to see if the credits are different.
The squad sheet and the small print
The notification dropped at 11.42 on a Monday morning, which is exactly the kind of timing that tells you a club has been told thirty seconds before the FA has pressed send. I do not blame the club. I blame the ritual. We have been here before, the lot of us. We have been here with Kenny, with Danny, with the lad whose name I still refuse to type because he never wore the shirt properly. The cycle is always the same. Full back breaks through at Spurs, earns a squad number with a story attached, gets the Three Lions on the back of a six-game run, and we are told to be proud of the pathway as if the pathway is the point.
The pathway is not the point. The cap is the point. A cap is a thing in a glass case that nobody can take away from a boy from Thurrock whose mum drove him to training in a car that smelt of BOY, and I will not have my club's most local hero in a decade reduced to a bullet point in a press release. So no, I am not doing the proud tweet. I am doing the suspicious one.
What De Zerbi actually changed, and why this call up is partly his
Here is the part I will give them. De Zerbi came in and did the only thing nobody else had the nerve to do, which is to play Djed Spence as a wing back who is allowed to attack. Not as a shape. Not as a body to fill a corridor. As a player. The goal at the Etihad in late September, the one where he took the ball off a City centre half near the touchline and beat two men before sliding it across for Solanke, that is not a clip. That is a coaching thesis in ninety seconds. And De Zerbi wrote it.
I say this because I have been around long enough to know that the previous regime would have started Destiny Udogie every week and told us Spence was a project. Spence was never a project. Spence was a player who had been relegated to a project by people who do not like the look of him. There is a type. You know the type. They see a full back with dreadlocks and they start writing risk assessments. De Zerbi looked at him and saw a wide midfielder with the lungs of a centre mid and the brain of a No 10, and that is why the FA is making a phone call this morning instead of the other way round.
But, and this is the but I have been saving, none of that gets him on the pitch at Wembley on Friday. The call up is a flag in the sand. The flag does not score a goal. The flag does not win a tackle in the 89th minute against a Brazil who has come on for the last twenty. The flag does not get you a second cap, or a third, or the Kenny Dalglish line on your Wikipedia page that Robertson is about to set for Scotland. The flag is a receipt. I want the meal.
The film I have seen before, and the scene I am looking for this time
Let me list the scenes, because I have watched them all. Scene one: full back trains well for six weeks, gets a call up, makes the bench, comes on for eight minutes against a team ranked 90 in the world, goes back to his club, and the next call up is in two years. Scene two: full back trains well for six weeks, gets a call up, is not even on the bench, flies home, never gets another one. Scene three: full back gets the cap, the next game he starts he plays like a man still in his club kit, the nation writes him off, the manager who picked him gets sacked in March, and we are all back at the start. I have seen scene three happen to a Spurs player personally and I will not name him because his mum reads this site.
The scene I am looking for this time is one we have never filmed. It goes like this. Scene four: Spence is in the squad, he starts one of the two games, he does not play safe, he takes a player on at the byline, he wins a free kick in a dangerous area in the first half, the manager leaves him on for the full ninety, and the next month he is in the squad again, and the month after that, and at some point in the spring he is the first name on the team sheet. That is the film I want to be in. I am tired of the trailer.
I am also tired, and I will say this once, of being the club that supplies the supporting cast for other nations' stories. Robertson is going to break Dalglish's record as a Tottenham player. Fine. Beautiful. But I want a Spurs full back to break a record of his own, and I want it to be for England, and I want it to be Spence, and I want it to be on a Tuesday night in a place like Helsinki in the rain with nobody watching and the nation discovering him the way we discovered him, which is late, and which is none of our fault.
The Tuchel variable, and why I am watching him too
Thomas Tuchel is the kind of manager who picks a full back and then does not speak to him for four months. I have watched him do it. He did it to Reece James. He did it to Chilwell in a more public way. He does it because he thinks the cap is a tool, not a gift, and he is not wrong tactically but he is wrong spiritually. The cap is a gift. The cap is the thing that tells a kid from a council estate that the country noticed. If you are going to use it as a lever, you owe the kid the truth about what the lever does, and Tuchel has never given anyone the truth about anything in his life.
So I am watching Tuchel the way I am watching the linesman at the Lane. I am not trusting the smile. I am not trusting the press conference. I am not trusting the squad photo in which Spence is going to be standing at the end because that is where new caps stand. I am trusting the minute he gets on Friday, the minute he gets on Monday, and whether the next squad sheet has his name on it. That is the only data I will accept. I do not care about the flag. I care about the flag being stuck in.
And if Tuchel uses him for eight minutes of a 4-0 win over Andorra and then drops him for the qualifier against Brazil in March, I will write the blog post you are imagining and I will not be kind. I will be fair, which is worse. I will point at the assist chart and I will point at the minutes played and I will do the maths that Tuchel apparently cannot, and I will end the post with the words we have all used on this site before, which is that the system is not corrupt, the system is just indifferent, and that is a worse thing to be.
What Spence owes us, and what we owe him
Spence owes us nothing. Let me put that on the record. The boy owes the club his best, and we have spent two years doubting his best because the last three full backs we had were short, slight and read the game like a librarian, and Spence is none of those things. Spence is six foot one and runs like a man late for a train and crosses the ball like a man who believes, and we have been unforgiving of all four of those qualities. He owes us the same thing he owes himself, which is to keep doing the thing that got him here, which is to play as if the coaching staff had not told him to play.
What we owe him is the queue. That is what I have been trying to say. We owe him the queue of us at the airport, or the queue of us outside Wembley, or the queue of us at the pub, the line of Tottenham faces that have been waiting for a homegrown full back to get a senior cap since a long time before I started this blog and have not stopped waiting. We owe him the line. We owe him the version of the song that has his name in it, not the one where we chant England's number one, because that is a chant for keepers and Spence is not a keeper and never will be. We owe him the cold night at Wembley in February when he is on the bench and we are all watching the warm up and we know.
I am not going to do the proud tweet. I said that at the top. I am going to do the patient one. I am going to wait. I am going to watch the first ten minutes of Friday, and the first ten of Monday, and the squad sheet in November, and the squad sheet in March. I am going to do the thing I should have done the last time we got excited about a full back and the flag, which is to hold the praise until the cap is a habit and not a headline. Spence is the first name I have written down on a list of my own this season. The list is short. The list is private. The list is a list of players I am willing to get my hopes up for, and it has two names on it and one of them is him.