England takes another step toward bringing ‘it’ home
SAMARA, RUSSIA — There was little here to please the esthetes, nothing much to arouse the adrenalin junkies.
But after 90 straightforward, some might say dull, minutes of soccer Saturday, England and its fans were awakened to this invigorating new reality: The team, young and until now unproven, is headed to its first World Cup soccer semifinal since 1990.
All it took were two headed goals and two strong saves for England to produce a competent, uncomplicated and sometimes uncompelling 2-0 victory over Sweden. Now the second-youngest team at the tournament — with an average age of 26 — is in striking distance of the final. England will face Croatia, who beat Russia on penalty kicks, in a semifinal Wednesday.
“We’re not the finished article,” England’s manager, Gareth Southgate, said. “We don’t have renowned, world-class players yet, but we have lots of good, young players who are showing on a world stage that they’re prepared to be brave with the ball, try to play the right way and have showed some resilience over the last few weeks.”
The England fan base in recent days has been rallying around a catchphrase — “It’s coming home” — that seemed at first to be cried out with a tinge of irony. It was the product of a perspective established and hardened through years of disappointment at the World Cup; now, increasingly, the slogan appears to harbour a sense of earnest expectation.
The spiritual figurehead of the team in many ways has been Southgate, a former England player whose self-effacing enthusiasm has become central to the group’s appeal. With a subtle knack for storytelling, he has done as much as any columnist to build a narrative about his players as lovable underdogs. About their ambition to reach the final, rather than to play a third-place match after losing in the semifinals, Southgate said: “We spoke to the players today that none of us fancied going home. We’ve got to be here for another week, so it’s up to us the games we play in.”
And asked about uniting their country during a period of political division, he said, “All these players come from different parts of the country, and there will be youngsters watching at home from the areas that they come from who they’ll be inspiring at this moment, and that is of course even more powerful than what we’re doing with our results.”
The road to the final has looked surprisingly open for England for a while now, thanks at first to an easy group stage and now because of a series of fortuitous results in other games. England, with a different series of outcomes, could have faced Brazil or Germany in the quarter-finals and Spain in the next round. For all the perverse joy that neutral fans may have found in seeing the fall of the tournament’s traditional titans, it created the possibility for more games like the one Saturday — a scrappy affair, with fewer dimensions. Neutral fans looking for an entertaining game here never stood a chance.
Most important, England had ticked off another box, had done its job. One more victory, and the country will play for its first World Cup trophy since 1966.