England’s two Harrys combine to prompt a roar of collective joy
Whisper it, but England continue to make unnervingly serene progress through this Euro2020 tournament. In the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, their first match away from Wembley, they outplayed Ukraine with minimum drama and maximum fluent efficiency. Four goals. No penalties. No VAR geometry lessons. Alone among teams remaining, England are yet to concede a goal – a clean sheet of seven hours and counting. Once again, they never allowed collective anxiety to rise anywhere near danger levels. Nails remain unchewed. We still haven’t needed to retreat behind the sofa.
“The nation needs reassurance,” Gary Lineker, a veteran of too many nerve-shredding nights past, observed before kick off. It was provided initially in only the third minute by England’s captain Harry Kane who poked in a smart pass from the team’s most potent threat, Raheem Sterling. And then, again, as if on demand, in the opening two attacks of the second half, when first Harry Maguire and then Kane powered in a headers. Jordan Henderson got the fourth, his first in an England shirt. Unusually, Gareth Southgate seem to have assembled a team that has no interest at all in finding new dramatic ways to lose.
The match may have lacked the historic catharsis of Tuesday’s victory over Germany, but it provided another opportunity for full-throated collective joy after a year of muted seclusion. Quarantine rules meant that a few thousand expats in Italy and neighbouring countries were required to stand in for England’s usual travelling fans, but the Salami army, as the Sun had it, made plenty of noise.
After the Germany game, Southgate had suggested, characteristically that “we’ve achieved one challenge, but that’s not the Everest we set ourselves”.
As he knew the threat here always lay in looking too far ahead and stumbling into a crevasse – “doing an Iceland” in other words, and repeating the humiliation of the last European Championship match England couldn’t lose, until they did, five years ago.
Kane was among only three survivors from that Iceland defeat in this lineup. England’s captain and talisman has played most of this tournament with a curious lethargy as if saving himself for a greater test. Even against Germany, for three-quarters of the match he floated and jogged, with none of his usual incisive threat, as if he had changed his mind pre-tournament about what kind of player he was.
Here, he was right back to his former self, always direct and threatening near goal, and could easily have had a deserved hat-trick but for a fingertip save from the Ukraine goalkeeper.
Ukraine have reached this stage of the tournament mostly by not knowing when they are beaten. They finished third in their group, having lost to the Netherlands and Austria. Their last 16 victory came in the death throes of extra time against a Sweden team playing with 10 men. But beyond a few moments of threat toward the end of the first half here they had no answer to England’s energy and poise.
It is a mark of the manager’s pragmatism that he once again allowed himself just a single real indulgence among the 11 on the field at any one time. He has the magical talents of Bukayo Saka, Jadon Sancho, Jack Grealish and Phil Foden to conjure with, but is reluctant to pull more than one from the hat at a time.
This time it was Sancho’s turn to start, to run with freedom, to break the more predictable patterns of passing. German commentators have been surprised to see how the Bundesliga’s most spectacular young player of the last couple of seasons cannot command a regular starting place in England’s team. Before the match Southgate suggested, deadpan, that Sancho “has been bright in training” (Manchester United who agreed to sign the player for £78m this week would no doubt expect nothing less).
Once again, though, for all England’s goals, this victory was built around the dependable muscle of Declan Rice and Kalvin Phillips, who play like a pair of bouncers with a particularly severe door policy, two men who invariably tend to kick the ball the way they are facing. Both men began this match with a yellow card; another would have seen them miss the semi-final, but they were never pressured even into that indiscretion, and could be withdrawn before the end.
They were joined in their endeavour by Chelsea’s Mason Mount who returned after his period of Covidisolation after his post-match hug with Scotland’s Billy Gilmour. Mount seemed more determined than ever to be at the heart of this England team, filling spaces and finding angles.
All coaches mould teams in their own image, and this one becomes more of an expression of Southgate’s character and philosophy with each game. His bestselling self-help book for the Prince’s Trust last year Anything is Possible, in part told the story of how “a skinny introverted teenager who was once told he couldn’t make it as a footballer to someone who played for and managed his country”.
Southgate didn’t play for England himself until he was 25. The qualities he defined as essential to that change were bravery, kindness and ambition: all three flow though his squad.
The true test of any manager is to keep the 15 players who aren’t in the first team happy, and Southgate appears to have managed that trick far better than his recent predecessors. He has, so far, succeeded in uniting all the thrilling young talent at his disposal.
Grealish was among those who did not get on the pitch this time as the England manager rotated his team, but for once you did not sense England’s most flamboyant talent brooding at his omission. Whether the detractors like it or not that unity begins with the players taking a knee, a gesture that Ukraine declined to join in with. The more often they do it, the more it looks like a proper statement of inclusion at a time of division.
The soundtrack to England’s tournament has been Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline. There will certainly have been hands touching hands right across the nation last night. Not to mention cheeks being kissed, arms being locked and voices being raised. At Wembley’s Boxpark and at big screens and pubs across the country as the goals kept coming, it was inevitably raining lager and mayhem; Covid restrictions looking a socially distant memory. Great sporting moments always set their own rules, but no doubt Sage advisers and government ministers could hardly bear to watch, while most of the rest of the nation still dared to dream.
There were a few other milestones in this victory, among them the fact that Southgate, quietly, has now won more tournament knockout matches than any other England manager, including Sir Alf Ramsey. This win leads his confident, resolute team back to a semi-final at Wembley against Denmark on Wednesday. The Danes’ passage to this stage reads increasingly like a fairytale after the trauma of Christian Eriksson’s on-field collapse in their opening fixture (Eriksson was happily pictured outside hospital for the first time an hour before the start of this match).
Still, England could not have hoped for a more winnable semi-final on home turf in front of the largest crowd – 60,000 people – that the nation has seen in any stadium for a year. And then beyond that, the prospect of a final, also at Wembley next Sunday. “You can’t keep everyone happy,” Southgate said before the game, but for three more days at least, there’s nobody out there currently doing a better job.