THIRD TIME
Spence's Third Cap Tells The Story The Squad Never Gets
He started again. That is the lede, that is the whole story, and it is the one nobody outside N17 wants to print. Djed Spence has gone from the player we were told did not exist to the player Tuchel keeps picking, and I am going to keep saying it out loud until somebody explains to me why a man who cannot get a minute on Match of the Day can get a start at Stadio Diego Armando Maradona against a nation we are not supposed to lose to. We have been keeping receipts on this one since the day we got humoured for even bringing it up, and the file is now thicker than the excuses.
What actually happened on the pitch
I will give you the bones of it because the main feed will not. England played Italy in Naples on the Friday, the friendly before the competitive one, and Spence started at left back in a three. He had been on the previous camp, got the cap, came back, started again, and the studio at half time did a piece on "system fits" and "profile changes" as if a man who plays the position in the Premier League every week had been a tactical experiment. Tuchel has now picked him three times in a row. Three. That is not a flirtation. That is a relationship.
The other relevant number is the one the highlights did not show. Spence completed the most dribbles of any England player on the night, won the ball back in the final third twice, and was not at fault for either goal. He also took the corner that led to the equaliser, which the FA's own website logged in the match report in the time it took three pundits to start arguing about something else. I have stopped being surprised by any of this, which is its own kind of sad.
There is a pattern to a Djed Spence story. He plays well. We write that he played well. Two days later a column appears explaining that we are being emotional, that it is a small sample, that we are fans and not analysts. Then he plays well again. Then a different column appears explaining that the first column had a point. Then he plays well a third time and the original column is quietly deleted. I have watched this loop three times in eighteen months and I am done pretending the people running the loop are not doing it on purpose.
Why this one matters more than the first two
The first cap was a headline. The second cap was a sentence. The third cap is a paragraph, and paragraphs are what the file is made of. With one cap you are a story. With two you are a coincidence. With three you are a selection, and selections have to be defended, which is the part the rest of the country has been hoping to avoid.
De Zerbi said his bit on the Friday press call, brief, no theatre, the kind of answer he gives when he is not interested in arguing with you. "He deserves it. He trains like someone who has already been here ten years. I don't pick the England team, but if I did, he would be in it." That is it. That is the whole quote. Read it again. There is no complaint in there about the schedule, no coded dig at the federation, no fishing for sympathy about the minutes he has missed. He named the player, he credited the federation, and he moved on. The fact that this is treated as remarkable tells you everything about the rest of the bench.
The other reason it matters is the opponent. Italy, away, in a stadium that has been awkward for England since at least the night David Bentley scored a free kick nobody has forgiven him for. Spence played the whole first half on the left of a back three in a 3-2-4-1 shape that Tuchel has only really used in qualifying, and did not look like a man who was overawed. I have watched a lot of England left backs look overawed in Naples, including one or two who were told at the time that they were the future of the position. He did not look overawed. He looked like he had been told where the changing room was, which is the minimum, and which apparently is a story.
The receipt I have been keeping since January
Here is what I wrote in January, because I want it on the record. "Djed Spence is the best attacking full back at this football club and the only one of the four who can play on both sides without the shape collapsing, and I will keep saying this on this site every week until somebody on a sofa somewhere has to engage with it." I have kept saying it. The receipts folder on my laptop is now a hundred and twenty four entries long and growing. I keep them because nobody else was going to.
The folder includes the game against Brighton in February where he set up two goals and the post match discussion was about the away end. It includes the game at the Etihad where he handled Jeremy Doku, an actual elite dribbler, for ninety minutes and the verdict the next morning was that the system had been too cautious. It includes the Carabao Cup tie at Portman Road where he played left back, right back and wing back in the same match, scored one and assisted one, and the local paper ran a piece the next day about how the loan system was bad for development. Every file in that folder says the same thing, which is that the player is good enough and the coverage is not interested.
What changed between then and now, for the avoidance of doubt, is nothing about the player. What changed is that Tuchel saw it, picked it, and refused to be embarrassed about the pick. That is the whole transfer window. The rest of the country is now retroactively deciding they always rated him, which is the bit I am refusing to let through the door without a fight.
What the other options look like, in case anyone asks
For balance, and I use the word in the loose sense the BBC uses it, here is the actual competition. There is a right back at Manchester City who costs more per week than our entire defence and cannot get a cap because the manager does not trust him in a back three. There is a left back at Chelsea who is so clearly the first choice that nobody ever mentions him, which is a privilege Spence is being told to wait for. There is a Newcastle full back who is fine and who gets a paragraph of praise every time he completes a five yard pass. Spence has outperformed all three of them on a per ninety basis across the last calendar year, on the data the FA's own scouting department publishes, and he is the one being treated like a project.
I am not asking anyone to feel sorry for him. He is at Tottenham, he is playing, he is on a contract that will pay him well into his thirties, and he has an England cap on his headstone already, plural. What I am asking, again, is that the conversation stop pretending the story is about him. The story is about us. About the fact that a player we got from Middlesbrough for less than the price of a single season of Richarlison's amortisation is now starting for England at left back in Naples while the man we sold him for is on loan at a Turkish side. The story is about a recruitment department that got it right and a media ecosystem that has decided, on no evidence I have been shown, that the right thing to do is to look the other way.
Where this leaves us going into the next break
There is a World Cup at the end of this season, if you have missed the news, which is currently being hosted by a country I will not name because I do not want to be rude about the stadium they are renovating. The squad will be picked in the spring. The friendlies between now and then are not friendlies, they are auditions that the FA pretends are friendlies, and Spence is going into them with three caps, three starts, and zero reasons to be nervous. If you are Tuchel, and I have been asked to play you in this column because I do not get asked anywhere else, you keep starting him. You keep starting him against weaker opposition to give him the reps. You keep starting him against stronger opposition to confirm what the reps already said. There is no other rational path.
For us, the season keeps going. The break is the break, we have written about it before, and we will write about it again. The squad comes back next Monday and the run to mid December is the part of the fixture list that decides whether we are a story or a footnote. Spence comes back to a dressing room where De Zerbi has been quietly building the kind of culture where a player can go away, do well, come back, and not have to pretend it was a team effort. I do not need to be thanked for saying it out loud. I just need it to keep being true, and the receipts folder is open if anyone wants to argue.