England boss Thomas Tuchel unhappy with his side’s first-half showing – and criticises players for not sticking to the gameplan against New Zealand

Thomas Tuchel criticized England’s first-half XI and the field as the Three Lions began their World Cup preparations with a lowly win against New Zealand.

The German appeared unimpressed with the first 45 minutes, in which Harry Kane scored the only goal of the game and accused his first-line players of playing ‘freestyle’.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I’m not very happy. ‘We were out of position in the first half and it was a bit too freestyle.’

When asked what he meant by this, Tuchel said his team had cheated and abandoned their game plan. ‘We’ve been changing positions for a very long time,’ he said. ‘It’s okay to change positions, but you need to find the position again so everyone knows how to start the attack and so we can accelerate the game more easily.

‘And we were making crosses, which is not normally our style of play, we were putting in a lot of crosses, we were taking long-range shots. We played too many long balls, made too many long passes; These were not part of the training in the last four days.’

Daily Mail Sport on Friday revealed how England will face the ‘plug and play’ pitch, which was installed at Raymond James Stadium, home of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, about a week ago.

And Tuchel was less than impressed with the surface despite there being no injuries to his side.

‘It was very difficult to play,’ he said. ‘We have no injuries and we haven’t had any concerns, but the situation was very unbalanced and moving the ball quickly doesn’t help you when you have the ball for most of the match.’

When asked if he was surprised to have to deal with this on the first trip, he replied: ‘It is. ‘I know from pre-season tours abroad that if you’re playing in stadiums, normally in football stadiums the pitch may be very new, not fully grown and not fully levelled.’

Tuchel started the tournament with Morgan Rogers, leading some to wonder whether Jude Bellingham would be happy to be on the bench when the tournament begins. However, come the second half, Bellingham became captain and Tuchel warned against knowing too much about the situation.

“No decisions have been made for Croatia yet and there is no secret message,” Tuchel said. ‘We try to have more or less equal teams and Harry and Morgan have played a lot of games together for us and we had a strong group in training yesterday with Jude, Nico O’Reilly and Elliot Anderson and we kept them together because they enjoyed playing against us in training yesterday. That’s it, no hidden messages.’

Tuchel praised Real Madrid’s playmaker, who missed two months of the season due to a hamstring injury. “He came back from injury, he is full of energy and happy to be back on the field,” he said.

‘Unfortunately he had a break in a decisive part of the season, the Champions League season, and then he had a national season in Spain to win the title, so it was very unfortunate for Real Madrid and for him personally, but now you can see that he’s in a really good place, he’s back, he’s fresh, he wants to play and he’s at his best.’

Meanwhile, All Whites coach Darren Bazeley and the former Watford, Wolves and England Under-21 defender also appeared unimpressed with England’s performance. ‘If they want to win the World Cup they have to be better than they are today,’ he said.

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