Tuchel's selection puzzle: Gordon's audition puts Bellingham's No. 10 in the dock
At full-time in the 3-0 win over Costa Rica on 10 June 2026, Thomas Tuchel had the result he wanted and the headache he did not. England coasted through their final official friendly, with Anthony Gordon seizing the kind of audition tape a winger can ride all the way to a World Cup squad. The subplot is louder: a forward who plays with directness and tempo has just pushed his case in front of a coach who has spent the spring searching for a central identity.
The fixture in question was billed as a dress rehearsal. Tuchel has now had his look, and the question of who plays the No. 10 role when England open the tournament against Croatia, scheduled for the following Wednesday in Dallas, is no closer to being closed. The Costa Rica game was, in the German's words, the day he showed his hand. The hand has a flourish the squad did not necessarily expect.
Gordon's case in three acts
Anthony Gordon did not just start; he imposed himself. Sky Sports' player ratings named him the brightest performer on the night, and the broad shape of his evening is consistent across the two match reports filed immediately after the final whistle: he carried the ball with intent, stretched Costa Rica's block, and made the sort of vertical runs that the rest of the forward line can build around. England scored three and, in the process, hinted at what a team playing with tempo and direct running can do when the metronome is the runner, not the No. 10.
That matters because the player Gordon is most directly competing with is not a winger. It is Jude Bellingham, who has been the team's emotional centre across the previous cycle and who, in this game, was asked to play a deeper, connective role. The Bellingham-at-10 question was already on the fixture card before kick-off: BBC Sport framed the warm-up as a decision point for Tuchel, and the headline, "Bellingham at number 10? Will Saka start? It's decision time for Tuchel," reads less as a question than an announcement that the position is still genuinely open.
The third strand is Bukayo Saka. Sky Sports' same-night note put the winger into the same selection bucket as Bellingham, implicitly clearing the runway for Gordon on the left and a more orthodox front three.
What Tuchel is actually choosing between
Strip the personnel question down and the choice is between two models. The first is the Real Madrid model: Bellingham as a No. 10 with the licence to arrive late into the box, with the team structured to compensate for the space he vacates higher up. The second is a Premier-League model now in vogue: a left-sided runner as the primary vertical outlet, with the No. 10 repositioned as a deeper, connective eight, and the creative burden shared across the front line. The Costa Rica game was the cleanest live test of the second model this calendar year, and it worked.
That does not settle the argument. Costa Rica are not Croatia, and a friendly is not a group-stage game in a tournament. Gordon's evening proves he has the profile; it does not prove he has the head for the noise of a Dallas opener against a side that finished third in Qatar. Tuchel knows this. The post-match framing in both match reports leans toward the same verdict: a problem of selection, not a problem of identity. England know what they want to be. They are still working out who, specifically, gets to be it.
A squad selection that has been harder than the results suggest
The headline numbers across the spring have been comfortable. The 3-0 scoreline flatters a side that was, in the moment, building rhythm rather than responding to pressure, and the broader pre-tournament pattern is one of control: opponents constrained, chances created, minutes distributed across the squad. That is, on the face of it, what an elite team is supposed to look like three days before a World Cup opener.
It is also what makes the Bellingham-Gordon axis worth lingering on. A team with this much attacking depth should not have a single selection debate of this intensity three days out from the tournament. That it does tells you something about the shape of the squad: full of Premier-League starters and Champions-League-level rotation, light on a settled attacking shape, and with a manager who has chosen to keep the central conversation open rather than announce a hierarchy and let it harden.
The stakes for Dallas and beyond
If Tuchel keeps the 3-0 structure against Croatia, the call is Gordon on the left, Bellingham deeper, and the creative weight distributed. If he folds back to the previous cycle's spine, the call is Bellingham at 10 and the question of who occupies the wide-left minutes in a way that does not also ask a 21-year-old to defend against a veteran right-back. The third option, the one the Costa Rica warm-up has made harder to ignore, is that the hierarchy itself is the wrong frame, and that the answer to a No. 10 question in 2026 is to give the minutes to a runner and a set of eights.
None of this is settled. What the final warm-up has done is turn a managerial preference into a live tactical question with a 90-minute answer attached to it. Tuchel will name his side, and the squad will know within an hour whether the Costa Rica night was a footnote or a starting point.
Desk note: Monexus has read the post-match reporting from Sky Sports and the BBC together and treated the two player-rating reads and the line-up readouts as the spine of the piece. Where the match reports diverge on emphasis, Monexus has flagged the divergence rather than smoothing it over.