England and Thomas Tuchel provide Reece James' best hope of rediscovering top form | OneFootball

Familiar coach in Thomas Tuchel and more traditional full-back role provide perfect opportunity for Chelsea captain

Your matchday briefing on Chelsea, featuring team news and expert analysis from Malik Ouzia

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From the look on Reece James’s face, you would not have known he had just scored his first England goal. Heck, from the look on his face you’d have thought he’d just seen a fox mutilate a chicken, not curled a free-kick into the top corner from 30 yards at Wembley.

For almost 40 minutes, he had watched his side toil against a Latvia side ranked 140th in the world, who had come to London with even less a sense of adventure than Albania had 72 hours earlier. Even presented with an open goal by Jordan Pickford and Marc Guehi, visiting No9 Vladislavs Gutkovskis steered into the side-netting.

James, though, delivered a moment of outrageous quality, one that took opposition out of the equation as an England full-back broke open a one-sided game, just as Jude Bellingham’s pass and Myles Lewis-Skelly’s finish had from the opposite flank against the Albanians three nights ago.

This was, for a while, on course to be a carbon copy of that match, a Harry Kane strike laid on by Declan Rice clinching the game, before Eberechi Eze provided some point of difference with his first England goal off the bench.

However subdued the outward show at his own, inside James must surely have felt a swell as his free-kick arched over the Latvian wall and inside the post with almost unfair precision.

It has been a long road back to this stage for the Chelsea man, whose final-minute cameo against Albania had been his first England appearance in two years. This was his first start in getting on for three, with two major tournaments missed in that time.

That has never really been in doubt. But the hamstring injuries that have riddled the full-back, including in forcing him into the surgery that effectively ruled him out of Euro 2024, have subsided at the perfect moment, a clean run at things at club level since the turn of the year coinciding with the arrival of the coach under whom he once thrived and won the Champions League. The following season - Tuchel’s only full campaign at the Chelsea helm - remains the best of James’s disrupted career, including five goals and nine assists in 26 Premier League games.

Circumstances, too, made it easy for Tuchel to turn so quickly to an old favourite without reservation, missing both Trent Alexander-Arnold to injury and Ben White, who is available for selection again but not yet up to full match speed.

Reece James’ moment of brilliance ended England’s lengthy wait for an opening goal

The FA via Getty Images

Without James, and with White in self-exile, the late-Gareth Southgate era saw the former coach essentially choosing between the unique creative talent of Alexander-Arnold and the security of Kyle Walker. More often than not, he plumped for the latter, as Tuchel did in his first game in charge. At the start of last summer’s Euros, Southgate even tried to shoehorn both into one team, before abandoning the experiment not a moment too soon.

James when fit, though, has often been thought of as the ideal hybrid model, a solution at the midway point between two extremes. There were few windows to prove it here, but he is more defensively reliable than his Liverpool contemporary and offers far more than the veteran Walker going the other way.

Tuchel is a pragmatic coach and what he wants from his full-backs will no doubt depend on the opposition, though it will not be until next summer’s World Cup face a truly elite attacking force in a competitive setting, if indeed they do at all. The profile of player he opts for on the right may also depend on what happens on the left, where the fluid use of Lewis-Skelly is giving England a fresh dynamic and already emerging as a hallmark of the new regime.

Ironically, James has been playing his club football of late either in a similar inverted role or as a midfielder outright under Enzo Maresca, who does not have a great deal of time for conventional, up-and-down wing-backs. Just ask Ben Chilwell.

James, by contrast, has proved his adaptability for his club. Still, it may yet be at international level, in his old role and under familiar tutelage, that he truly rediscovers his best.