The Newcastle United starlet who offers Thomas Tuchel a tantalising glimpse into England’s future

In a fortnight’s time, Lee Carsley’s brief tenure as interim head coach of England will be over, which means that the squad announced today for the upcoming Nations League games is rather unusual, a ghost squad laden with considerably less consequence than is typically the case. But there is still a tantalising opportunity to look at the shape of things to come.

Most England squad announcements are statements of tactical intent and of how individual players are viewed by the coaching staff, with implications for the months or years to come – but the incoming permanent head coach Thomas Tuchel had no input in the selection process, and Carsley will soon return to the Under-21s. Nothing in Thursday’s squad announcement has any meaning beyond the scope of the forthcoming matches against Greece and the Republic of Ireland.

But two players still get debuts despite the fact that Carsley has no inherent incentive to experiment or look to the future – Taylor Harwood-Bellis of Southampton, who is preferred to John Stones, and Newcastle United left-back Lewis Hall. It is the latter’s performances in an England shirt which could be critical to the way Tuchel’s team plays across the coming World Cup cycle.

Left-back has, quite suddenly, become a serious problem position for England. Luke Shaw has been raddled by a string of injuries and hasn’t played for his club for nearly nine months. Ben Chilwell, meanwhile, is in a state of limbo at Chelsea, all but exiled from the first-team squad due to an apparent tactical mismatch and unable to play in consequential matches.

The result has been a series of experiments with right-footed, right-sided players hammered into a round hole for which they lack the appropriate shape. Trent Alexander-Arnold and Rico Lewis, for instance, have been given a chance to impress in that position, Kieran Trippier played on the left prior to his post-Euros retirement, and Bukayo Saka even ended up finishing a match there, forced back into a role he had last played as an academy prospect.

It said a lot about the way England played with a right-footed player in that slot that Saka’s brief run-out as a wing-back for the last 30 minutes or so of the narrow win over Slovakia was probably as good as it got. Saka is nobody’s idea as a defender, but at least he was able to stay wide and keep the team’s shape intact.

Trippier – and worse still Alexander-Arnold and Lewis – were only really able to play the role as an inverted wing-back, coming into midfield and onto their favoured right boots. None of them were able to provide an overlapping option wide of the inside forward ahead of them, which not only cut out potential passing lanes but also meant that there was never an option for a cross from the byline. In other words, regardless of the many qualities all of the players tried have, playing any of them has rendered England too narrow and too predictable in attack.

It's highly unlikely that Tuchel, who values quick attacks and typically plays with his wing-backs wide and adventurous, will be keen to continue with the awkward solutions found by Carsley and Gareth Southgate before him. The problem is that with Chilwell rotting in the reserves and Shaw’s future fitness less than certain, there really wasn’t an English left-back who was left-footed and able to complement the attack to the appropriate degree playing at the top level – at least until Lewis Hall showed up.

It seems like a long time ago that Newcastle fans were baffled by Eddie Howe’s apparent reluctance to put Hall, then on loan from Chelsea before he signed permanently over the summer, into the starting eleven. Now 20 years old, Hall has been given his chance this season and has grasped it as firmly as anyone could have imagined.

Newcastle’s results and performances may have fluctuated as a team so far this season, but Hall has been a model of consistency and seems to be growing in stature as each game goes by. Already a rock solid defender, a good dribbler and an accurate, economical passer, Hall is reading the game better and better, making telling contributions at both ends of the field.

There was an excellent assist against Chelsea courtesy of a wide cross into Alexander Isak and a goal-line clearance against Arsenal in the last couple of weeks alone, and those highlight-reel moments are only the tip of an iceberg upon which he has made very mistakes indeed.

Positionally and stylistically, he seems built for Tuchel’s aggressive, high-energy and hard-pressing system and while he only has that one assists in the goal contributions column for his club this season (alongside two against Austria with the Under-21s), there is evidence that his productivity will be impressive in the long-run – for starters, a cross completion rate of 34% on the season, which is around double the Premier League average and higher even than Alexander-Arnold has managed.

If Shaw’s fitness does prove to be a lingering, long-term problem, and if Chilwell (hardly a stranger to injuries himself) doesn’t find somewhere to play some first-team football soon, then Hall may quickly become the only option at left-back. Fortunately, he looks up to the task.

It’s tempting to see Hall’s rapid emergence as a modern equivalent to the way that Ashley Cole burst unexpectedly into the spotlight two decades ago, which presumably makes Lewis, Alexander-Arnold and Trippier a composite Chris Powell for Generation Z. If Hall plays as well for England as he has for Newcastle, then Carsley might just be showing Tuchel a way forward for years to come. If he doesn’t, then he might show Tuchel the magnitude of the problem instead.