Club vs country is back with a vengeance after FA chiefs turned changing of the guard from Southgate to Tuchel into a humiliating farce. We’re like a pub team, writes OLIVER HOLT

Every hour, on the hour, an army pickup truck, with a green canvas hood stretched over the frame, pulls up in front of the Greek parliament building at one end of Syntagma Square.

Tourists watch as two soldiers, dressed in military finery, climb out the back and walk with slow, exaggerated steps toward two huts painted in the blue and white of Greece.

They relieve the pair who have just reached the end of their 60 minute shift and stand stiffly watching as the men they replaced get into the truck to be driven away.

Some spectators looked as if they found the spectacle and clothing somewhat comical, but you know what, at least the new crew showed up.

Unfortunately, that is more than can be said for Thomas Tuchel.

When England arrived in the Greek capital in the middle of their own changing of the guard on Wednesday evening, the new figurehead of the national team was nowhere to be seen.

It was no surprise: the FA have been absurdly business-as-usual about the fact that neither they nor their new coach thought it was important that he was here for this Nations League match.

Tuchel was announced as England’s new boss last month but did not attend training for the first match since his appointment as Gareth Southgate’s permanent replacement.

He didn’t pick the team either. There is also no word that he will try to influence agent Lee Carsley’s selection in any way.

He will also not bother to attend the match in the Olympic Stadium on Thursday evening.

Everyone seems to assume they’ll see the match on TV somewhere, but who knows? Maybe he has dinner plans. Maybe he promised to take the dog for a walk.

It’s all very manana, isn’t it. All terribly relaxed. And absolutely nothing to do with any issues surrounding the shortening of his contract with Bayern Munich last season.

The FA is adamant about that. They have agreed with Tuchel that he will start work on January 1, they say, and not a minute earlier.

After all, he is here to win the World Cup. Who cares if Greece comes away in a tinpot competition like the Nations League? There’s no need to sweat the small stuff.

The party line is that Tuchel is the kind of fast coach who does not yet have to get the English players used to his style and philosophy.

The party line is that he doesn’t need to waste his time on occasions like Greece-England. He starts in January, goes through the qualifying matches, wins the World Cup and leaves.

The party line is that he doesn’t want to get rid of Carsley, which is just ridiculous. An agent is an agent until a team appoints a new boss. Then the manager steps back.

So men like FA chief executive Mark Bullingham and technical director John McDermott can push as many party lines as they like.

They can congratulate themselves on bringing in a coach as highly regarded as Tuchel, and continue to bask in the joy of beating Manchester United to his signature.

But the uncomfortable truth is that they have turned the changing of the England guard from Southgate to Tuchel into a humiliating farce.

Far from being a smooth transition, the transition from one permanent boss to another has been terribly mismanaged.

England have been through many low points in their history, but they have never appointed a coach who doesn’t seem particularly keen to coach them.

No wonder there have been a record number of withdrawals from an English team for this match. If the coach can’t be bothered to be here, why should the players?

At last count, it was eight players who had been withdrawn from Carsley’s squad for his final two games in interim charge here and against the Republic of Ireland at Wembley on Sunday. Or was there nine? It’s gotten to the point where everyone loses count.

None of this is Carsley’s fault, of course. He is a fine coach with a bright future ahead of him, but despite his staunch denials on Wednesday, he is being used rather shabbily by the FA.

Under pressure from the media about his own chances of getting the job before and after the ties against Greece at Wembley and Finland in Helsinki, Carsley, to his credit, hid what he knew and stuck to his advice, even though some made ridicule him for it.

Carsley is just one of the victims of the FA’s apparent desire to secure Tuchel at all costs. Another is the debasement of the value of an England cap.

There was a time when they were hard to win, when they were cherished, when they had value, but some of that has been lost by the FA’s ridiculous handling of Tuchel’s appointment.

There have been times in recent days, as the epidemic of withdrawals spread, when it felt like we were one step away from dragging people off the streets and getting them to play.

Do you remember what it was like to play for your pub team on a Sunday morning? Someone doesn’t show up. They had a big one the night before and now they can’t bear to get out of bed. You are small. You have to do a ring round at the last minute.

That’s how it felt in England the past few days. Here too, it is the manager who sets the tone. If he has decided to take a pass, why wouldn’t some of England’s best players follow suit?

However, there is also a broader malaise at play in this farrago of a management succession. Something has already been lost. Something that Southgate spent a lot of time and care creating has already been damaged.

While consensus has emerged that Southgate was unable to adapt his tactics at critical moments, there is also widespread agreement that he has created a hugely positive culture within the England squad, which has national team has changed for the better.

Harry Kane, the England captain, spoke about it on Wednesday. He spoke of the love of playing for England that Southgate rekindled in his players after so many years, in previous eras of management, when they joined with a sense of dread.

The big worry was that once Southgate left, that culture would be weakened and the FA’s strangely vague and decidedly strange attitude about the start of Tuchel’s tenure started to make that fear a reality.

Kane was brutally honest about that change when asked by ITV’s Gabriel Clarke on Wednesday whether he felt the importance of playing for England was starting to ‘drift’ this week.

“Obviously it’s a shame this week,” Kane said. “Yes, look, I think it’s a difficult period of the season and yes, maybe that has been taken advantage of a little bit.

‘I don’t like it that much if I’m completely honest. I think, as I just said there, England comes first in any club situation.”

One of Southgate’s talents was that he was able to calm, if not end, the battle between club and country that had scarred England’s sides for so long. Now they appear to be taking revenge.

By the time he actually starts work, Tuchel will have wasted nine weeks or more of the opportunity to build on the culture Southgate created, or at least arrest its atrophy. His absence feels more and more strange with each passing day.

In all this, the draw against Greece was treated as an irrelevance and an afterthought. Tuchel may not think it’s worth being here to watch the match in person and get an idea of ​​which of the inexperienced England players could be of use to him, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some significance.

If England do not beat Greece, they are likely to have to play two Nations League play-off matches on March 20 and 23 next year in a bid to gain promotion to League A, potentially delaying the start of their World Cup qualifying. campaign.

English players will of course rush to sign up for those matches. Who knows, maybe some of them will have met Tuchel by then.