Tuchel is starting to get his wish with his England team

On the day he sat down to talk about his new job for the first time almost exactly a year ago, Thomas Tuchel articulated his wish for an England team to play like one hewn from the Premier League.

Some people didn't like that very much. English football, they said, had spent too long dragging itself out of the dark ages of long balls and flick-ons and pace and power to be dragged back there now. With two European Championship finals behind us in 2021 and 2024, we were sophisticates now weren't we?

Well, here at Wembley – out on the field only a hundred yards or so from where Tuchel sat that October day – the England manager started to see something approaching vindication.

The story to emerge from this encounter with a surprisingly compliant Wales team will be about Jude Bellingham. England can win without their best players, just as Tuchel told us they could.

That subject is rather more nuanced, of course. Between now and the World Cup next June, Tuchel does need to get his star turn into this team and deep down he will know it.

What is much clearer after two impressive big wins here and in Serbia last month, is that Tuchel's team is indeed going to go to America playing the kind of football he said he wanted from the start.

It's also only a year ago that we watched England's interim coach Lee Carsley try and fail to crowbar Bellingham, Cole Palmer and Phil Foden into the same team. It was a disaster as England lost here to Greece in the Nations League.

Here against the Welsh, Tuchel's England presented themselves in a completely different way. Playing a team that at least in principle wanted to engage, England were indeed too powerful and direct and pragmatic for their opponents.

In the latter stages of Gareth Southgate's time – by the end when his players had grown too familiar with the messaging – England's use of the ball became predictable and tired. Too intricate. Too backwards and sideways. A mess, really.

Tuchel's England have been subtly turned away from that. This at Wembley was a team of players operating at a level that we see from them on a Premier League weekend. Not too proud to cross the ball from deep. Not scared to embrace a set piece – something else Tuchel has preached from the start. Not afraid of playing a ball in to a channel and turning an opponent round.

An early goal helped. They always do. A second early goal helped even more. The third – from Bukayo Saka – was just perfect. The opening two were scrappy, ugly even. But they also spoke to players wishing to do the dirty stuff, of pursuing a lost cause when players in red had given up – as Marc Guehi did in only the 2nd minute – and of making the most of opportunities presented to them by a rival that seemed intent on going home broken.

There was a ruthlessness that Tuchel will have liked. Hence he will have enjoyed the first two goals – from eight yards and one yard – as much as he will Saka's thing of beauty.

In America next summer it will be different. Tuchel attended the Club World Cup in the summer and came home concerned about just how hot it was.

'Have you tried to run in Charlotte at 2pm,' he asked just last Friday.

England will have to find different ways of playing, especially if kick-off times are not pushed back to later in the day as is being mooted. They will also encounter the dreaded low block, especially in the group stage when opponents in such a bloated tournament are expected to be limited in ambition.

So England will need to be versatile. They will need their safe breakers. Impact players off the bench will on occasion be just as important as those who start.

But the key point today – eight months out from the start of the tournament – is that England are suddenly starting to develop some momentum.

Tuchel said last week that it was a training session that took place between the rather tepid 2-0 win over Andorra at Villa Park and the 5-0 thrashing of Serbia three days later that saw a number of players force their way into his team.

It can be presumed that one of those was Morgan Rogers. The 23-year-old did not start at Villa Park, his home stadium, and only came on with 22 minutes to go. Eberechi Eze played in the number ten spot that afternoon.

Rogers played in Belgrade, though, and did so again here. It is clear that one of the most important positions in Tuchel's 4-2-3-1 formation is now his to lose and it is this that presents the greatest obstacle to Bellingham's return.

One of the things that does frustrate Tuchel about the Real Madrid player is his infuriating positional indiscipline. The manager has drummed home the need to play the position and let everyone else play theirs but has not seen the response he hoped.

Here, Rogers was a danger throughout and remained one of his team's better players when their levels started to drop in the second half.

Rogers is the kind of prototype footballer that Tuchel wants with him in America. More widely, he wants some kind of dependability of performance. This is the point he was trying to make a year ago and he will now feel, with some degree of justification, that his team is starting to get there.