When Jude Bellingham helped England get back to the top level of the UEFA Nations League, he said he had “got his smile back.”

Bellingham has had a rough start to the season with Real Madrid. In his first 13 games for the Spanish champs, he only scored one goal.

With a slow start to the club season, Bellingham had a rough summer because he was on the England team that lost to Spain in the Euro 2024 final.

But Bellingham was back to his best on Sunday night, when he set up two goals in England’s 5-0 win over the Republic of Ireland at Wembley.

That game was the last one caretaker manager Lee Carsley was in charge of before Thomas Tuchel took over in January.

After the game, Bellingham wrote Carsley a 25-word goodbye message on Instagram.

He wrote in his message, “Many thanks to Lee and his staff for their hard work in these last few camps.” Thank you so much for giving me back my smile in an England shirt.

After Gareth Southgate left his job as manager of the England Under-21 team, Carsley was briefly promoted to lead the England first team in August.

He was in charge of six games, all in the Nations League, and five of them were wins. The only bad result for Carsley was a 2-1 loss at home to Greece in October. England made up for that loss, though, by beating Greece 3-0 on Thursday.

Following his six games in charge, Carsley will now put together an in-depth report for Tuchel to look over before he meets with the new England manager.

And Carsley thinks that the young players he has trained—many of whom he worked with when they were under-21—have the skills to make an impact under the German manager.

“We talked about not only getting promoted from the Nations League but also possibly getting more players for Thomas to choose from,” Carsley said after Sunday’s game.

“The players who have been in the last three camps now have to work hard to be in and around the March squad.” They have all done themselves a lot of good by showing that they are good enough to play on the England senior team. Getting a cap is also a big deal. A lot of them make me very happy.

“That job calls for a great coach with a history of success, and Thomas has that.” The bonus would be that we now have more people. It will be really hard to choose the next team, I’m sure. Fun times are coming up.

Some of these players are so good that they don’t want to take chances. They want to beat anything that stands in their way, and at the Under-21s, they expected to win.

“You always learn a lot about yourself when you’re not used to being in that situation. The best part is seeing the younger players come through; many of them have now seen themselves in an England shirt.”

Carsley wrote in his file, “I’m trying to put together a debriefing on all three camps with the rest of the staff.”

I’m going to write something down, and then I hope we can meet and talk about what we think and what we’ve found. We at U21 are here to help the senior boss do his or her job.