France v England: World Cup third-place playoff – live

Key events

Big wry smile at the cameras from Thomas Tuchel as he leaves the England bus in Miami.

Brian Dunne has been on: “First of all, a huge shout-out to all of you at The Guardian for your coverage of the World Cup; have been following the live blogs almost every game especially if I couldn’t watch it live.

Clearly neither England nor France really give a damn about this match, and it really doesn’t matter who wins this one. Since everyone else around the world is pretty much fed up with Argentina and Fifa’s shenanigans at this point and are rooting for Spain to win tomorrow, how about England and France here just unofficially agree to not play defense and ensure Mbappe wins the Golden Boot instead of Argentina’s Messi?”

David Wall gets in touch: “For all the discussion about whether England’s increasing defensiveness and eventual collapse stemmed from the players or the manager (and for what it’s worth i’m with Jonathan Liew) i think we’re asking the wrong question. Tuchel was hired specifically for those kinds of situations, to make the decisions that would get the team over the line, and nothing else like culture building that Southgate did so well.

“Whether his decision was to focus just on defending and abandon any attacking intent, or he made some other decision to try to prevent the players doing that naturally themselves, it didn’t work. So he got it wrong. And that raises questions hiring him in the first place. I don’t know if that means he should lose his job, if he can learn from this and make better decisions in the next tournament then hiring him would have been justified. But given he’s so far shown no sign that he even recognises something wrong with his decision making process, let alone a willingness to learn from the mistake, i think there have to be doubts about whether he should continue after this game has finished.”

Harry Desmond has been on: “I think this makes England (and France) the first team to play eight matches at the same World Cup - twice as many as the winners of the first four tournaments. That has to count for something, right? Also, I’d like to propose that we go full Star Wars and start calling it the “3PPO”.”

Lee Matthews gets in touch: “On TT, I don’t think we all want to play the ‘blame game’ as he says. I think we just want to understand what happened. I think we could move on if he could help us understand what it was like to make that decision under the stressful conditions he and his team were experiencing.

“Sat at home, we can say what we’d do without having to face the consequences. If he could open up and talk us through it, we could understand. More than any other tournament exit, I’m frustrated - my first WC was 1986. If he keeps saying he has ‘no regrets’ and these keep being the headlines, he’ll lose everyone’s support for good. Going for it tonight could help. Win or lose, if he goes for it, he can show what a post-WC TT England team will look like. Open up and talk to us TT and please go for it tonight… Fingers crossed….”

Goalkeeper Mike Maignan, midfielder Adrian Rabiot, forward Michael Olise and captain Kylian Mbappe are the French survivors from the semi-final with Spain. N’Golo Kante is on the bench, having been the non-playing Mainoo of Les Bleus.

Mbappe starts and will be chasing the Golden Boot. Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane are benched and so will have a lower chance of overtaking Mbappe and Lionel Messi.

Steve Farole gets in touch, and at length: “It was a pleasure to see you and the Football Weekly team at the Bowery Ballroom Thursday night. Great show!

“As an American, I’m bemused to see the English descend into your habitual post-tournament recriminations. The cycle is complete: after skepticism, then guarded optimism, you heeded the siren’s call of hope and now that your dreams have crashed upon the rocks, you’re looking for a scapegoat. Tuchel is an easy and, in many ways, appropriate target. England’s performance in the last 30 minutes was craven, his tactics and substitutions were negative and self-defeating.

“But stepping back, why did the FA think that Tuchel would succeed? Specifically, why did the FA believe a manager with no experience in the international game, at any level, would be the right man to lead England to glory? Of the four semi-finalists, England was the only one with a manager who had never been at the business end of a major tournament as either a coach or player: Deschamps was a World Cup winning player before taking the France job and de la Fuente and Scaloni both cut their teeth with their nation’s youth teams. You have to go back to Lippi in 2006 to find a manager who succeeded at a Euros or World Cup with no prior international experience - and even then, his achievements at the club level far outstripped Tuchel’s.”

Jordan Henderson is named on the bench despite a broken arm while Mainoo isn’t? Curious.

France v England teams

France: Maignan, Gusto, Konate, Lacroix, Theo Hernandez, Zaire Emery, Rabiot, Olise, Cherki, Doue, Mbappe. Subs: Samba, Risser, Digne, Upamecano, Kounde, Kone, Dembele, Tchouameni, Thuram, Barcola, Kante, Saliba, Lucas Hernandez, Mateta, Akliouche.

England: Dean Henderson, Quansah, Konsa, Guehi, Spence, Rice, Saka, Eze, Rogers, Rashford, Toney. Subs: Pickford, Trafford, Gordon, James, Madueke, Watkins, Jordan Henderson, Burn, Anderson, Kane, O’Reilly, Bellingham, Chalobah, Stones.

Referee: Jesus Valenzuela (Venezuela)

Team news imminent: the big line is that Kobbie Mainoo is out with an injury. “Kobbie Mainoo is ruled out of today’s matchday squad to face France due to injury,” reads an official statement. There’s been seven changes from Atlanta.

On Fox Sports, where they are currently showing IndyCar, they have just described 2026 as the “greatest World Cup in history”. Is that really so?

What of Deschamps himself? He had this to say: “I have a duty for this game. It is not a friendly. It is a third-place playoff. The players, staff, and I have the duty to reach this last objective. It is less important than the final. England does not want to play this game, and neither do we. But here we are.

“We have to set our eyes on that goal to be third and make this final goal a reality. We have this duty when wearing this jersey. In my head I know that it is my last match. I don’t want anybody to cry. The end is near but life goes on.”

There’s another team playing today, and that’s France, in Didier Deschamps’ final game. It is expected he will be replaced by Zinedine Zidane, his former midfield partners. Kylian Mbappe has been paying tribute to the outgoing coach.

“Today is your last dance. You, who ​have given us so much. We should have given ​you a better ending, but we failed,” Mbappe wrote in a message shared on social media. “Putting into words what you have brought over 14 years is very ‌difficult, ⁠because you have been such a major figure in the rebirth of this team. People have not always known how to appreciate your greatness, but time and history will ​take care of ​that.”

What of Thomas Tuchel himself? He’s doubling down. Turns out the man hired to win the World Cup had no chance of doing so with the players at his disposal.

“I believe that three other nations [in the semi-finals] have almost expectations to win the title. This is not us,” said Tuchel. “France, Spain, Argentina expect almost they’re on that level that they expect to win. We are not there yet. There is still a gap to close. This is what we will do from tomorrow. We will not stop. We will not stop hunting. We will not stop challenging. We have things to improve in a football matter. And this is the context. So there is not a lot of room for drama. If drama is needed, if the blame game needs to be played, OK, we can do that. But I have the right to not engage.”

Jonathan Liew did not spare the rod.

Two years of this. Countless millions sunk on tickets, hotels, Ubers, shirts, pizzas, flags, the hours spent on Google Maps trying to locate somewhere to eat after 11pm in Riga, the endless psychodrama over Jude Bellingham and whether he should have been left at home or not (turns out, not). How we bled and sweated over this, over the minor details of the journey, over whether Danny Welbeck had done enough to earn a place in the squad or not (turns out, not). All pointing towards the moment on Wednesday evening when England are 1-0 up in a World Cup semi-final against Argentina and your entire happiness rests on whether a bunch of millionaire footballers and a millionaire German coach can keep their shit together for 40 minutes, or not.

The England inquest will continue whatever happens here. Here’s Ed Aarons.

Despite the Football Association’s best efforts to produce players who are able to “intelligently dominate possession” as outlined when it launched its “England DNA philosophy” at St George’s Park back in December 2014, there is still a shortage of top-class central midfielders with the technical skills required to win a World Cup semi-final.

Niall McVeigh cast this ugly duckling of a fixture in a positive light.

Yes, the third-place playoff can have a hungover, world-weary vibe, but it can also be a lot of fun. The goals-per-game average is higher than in the final, and the TPPO has never gone to penalties. But does the result matter? It depends who you ask. Back in 1982, France lost an all-time classic semi-final on penalties to West Germany, and were extremely laissez-faire against Poland just two days later. “Our hearts were elsewhere,” Alain Giresse recalled 40 years on. “We had pulled the plug.” On the other hand, Poland’s 3-2 victory meant they matched their best-ever performance, having also won the TPPO against Brazil in 1970. Plenty of other teams have secured a new personal best via this fixture, including Austria, Chile, Portugal, Turkey and Belgium, whose 2-0 triumph over a checked-out England sealed third place in 2018, and a rousing civic reception when the squad returned home.

Preamble