Every hour, on the hour, an army pick-up truck, with a hood of green canvas stretched over its frame, pulls up in front of the Hellenic Parliament building at one end of Syntagma Square.
Tourists watch as two soldiers, dressed in military finery, climb out of the back and walk in slow, exaggerated steps towards two huts painted in the blue and white of Greece.
They relieve the pair who have just come to the end of their 60 minutes of duty and stand stiffly by while the men they have replaced clamber into the truck to be driven away.
Some spectators looked as if they may have found the spectacle and the attire faintly comical but, you know what, at least the new shift showed up.
Which is more, sadly, than can be said for Thomas Tuchel.
Thomas Tuchel (second right) was appointed as the next permanent England manager earlier this year
Lee Carsley is preparing for his final two games as England’s interim boss against Greece and Republic of Ireland
Tuchel will not assume command until after the new year, and has not travelled to Athens
When England arrived in the Greek capital on Wednesday evening in the midst of their own changing of the guard, the new figurehead of the national team was nowhere to be seen.
It wasn’t a surprise: the FA have been absurdly business-as-usual about the fact that neither they nor their new coach thought it important for him to be here for this Nations League tie.
Tuchel was announced as England’s new boss last month but he did not take training for the first game since his appointment as Gareth Southgate’s permanent replacement.
He did not pick the team, either. Nor it is said will he seek to influence caretaker manager Lee Carsley’s selection in any way.
Nor will he bother to attend the game in the Olympic Stadium on Thursday night.
Everyone seems to be presuming that he will watch the match on television somewhere but who knows? Maybe he’s got dinner plans. Perhaps he’s promised to take the dog for a walk.
It is all very manana, isn’t it. All terribly relaxed. And absolutely not anything to do with any issues relating to the curtailing of his contract at Bayern Munich last season.
The FA are adamant about that. They have agreed with Tuchel that he will start work on January 1, they say, and not a minute sooner.
The changing of the guard from Gareth Southgate (front left) to Tuchel has turned into a humiliating farce
Tuchel has no input in Carsley’s squad for their two upcoming Nations League clashes
He is here to win the World Cup, after all. Who cares about Greece away in a tinpot competition like the Nations League? No need to sweat the small stuff.
The party line is that Tuchel is the kind of fast-twitch coach who simply doesn’t need to start getting England’s players used to his style and his philosophy just yet.
The party line is he doesn’t need to waste his time with occasions like Greece-England. He’ll start in January, breeze through the qualifiers, win the World Cup and get out.
The party line is that he doesn’t want to elbow Carsley out of the way, which is patently ridiculous. A caretaker manager is a caretaker until a team appoints a new boss. Then the caretaker steps back.
So men like FA chief executive Mark Bullingham and technical director John McDermott can peddle as many party lines as they want.
They can congratulate themselves on snaring a coach as well-regarded as Tuchel, too, and continue to bask in the joy of beating Manchester United to his signature.
But the inconvenient truth is that they have turned England’s changing of the guard from Southgate to Tuchel into a humiliating farce.
Far from being a smooth transition, the change from one permanent boss to another has been horribly mismanaged.
The Football Association’s chief executive Mark Bullingham (left) can peddle as many party lines as he wants
Greece beat England in stunning fashion back when the two sides met at Wembley in October
England have endured plenty of low points in their history but they have never appointed a coach who doesn’t seem particularly keen to start coaching them.
No wonder there have been a record number of withdrawals from an England squad for this game. If the coach can’t be bothered to be here, why should the players?
At the last count, it was eight players who had pulled out Carsley’s squad for his final two games in interim charge here and against the Republic of Ireland at Wembley on Sunday. Or was it nine? It has got to the point where everyone is losing 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 loyal denials to the contrary on Wednesday, he has been used rather shabbily by the FA.
Pressed by 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 kept his counsel even as some ridiculed him for it.
Carsley is just one of the casualties of the FA’s apparent desire to get Tuchel at any cost. Another is the demeaning 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 in the risible way the FA have handled the appointment of Tuchel.
There have been times during the last few days, as the epidemic of withdrawals has taken hold, when it has felt as though we are one step away from dragging people off the streets to get them to play.
Harry Kane has slammed England drop-outs for ‘taking advantage of a tough period of the season’
Kane talked on Wednesday about how the love of playing for your country was resurrected by Southgate
Remember what it used to be like playing for your pub team on a Sunday morning? Someone doesn’t turn up. They had a big one the night before and now they can’t face getting out of bed. You’re short. You have to do a last-minute ring-round.
That’s what it’s felt like with England the past few days. Again, it is the manager who sets the tone. If he’s decided he’s going to take a pass, why shouldn’t some of England’s best players follow suit?
There is a wider malaise at play in this farrago of a managerial succession, too, though. Something has already been lost. Something that Southgate took a long time and lot of care to create has already been damaged.
If a consensus has arisen that Southgate lacked an ability to adapt his tactics at critical moments, there is also wide agreement that he established a hugely positive culture within the England set-up that changed the feeling around the national team for the better.
Harry Kane, the England captain, talked about it on Wednesday. He talked about the love for playing for England that Southgate resurrected in his players after so many years, in previous managerial eras, when they joined up with a feeling of dread.
The great concern was that once Southgate left, that culture would be weakened and the FA’s oddly vague and decidedly odd stance over the start of Tuchel’s employment has started to turn that fear into a reality.
Kane was brutally honest about that change when he was asked by ITV’s Gabriel Clarke on Wednesday whether he felt the importance of playing for England had started to ‘drift’ this week.
‘It’s a shame this week, obviously,’ Kane said. ‘Yeah, look, I think it’s a tough period of the season and, yeah, maybe that’s been taken advantage of a little bit.
One of Southgate’s talents was that he was able to quieten the club versus country battles within the dressing room
‘I don’t really like it if I’m totally honest. I think, like I just said there, England comes before anything, any club situation.’
One of Southgate’s talents was that he was able to quieten, if not end, the club versus country battles that had scarred England squads for so long. Now, they appear to be back with a vengeance.
By the time he actually begins work, Tuchel will have wasted nine weeks or more of opportunity to build on that culture that Southgate created, or at least to stop its atrophy. His absence feels more and more strange with every day that passes.
In all of this, the tie against Greece has been treated as an irrelevance and an afterthought. Tuchel might not think it worth his time to be here to witness the match in person and gain a sense of which of England’s inexperienced players might be of use to him, but that does not mean it does not carry some significance.
If England do not beat Greece, it is likely that they will have to play two Nations League play-off matches on March 20th and March 23rd next year in a bid to get promoted to League A, potentially delaying the start of their World Cup qualifying campaign.
England players will be positively rushing to join up for those fixtures, obviously. Who knows, some of them may actually have met Tuchel by then.
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