England’s new guard free from old ghosts
HOW would you expect a young England team with no experience at this level to come back from the most painful punch they will ever take? Would you even hope to see them drag themselves up off the canvas and do anything quite like this?
Here in Moscow, almost at midnight, Gareth Southgate’s World Cup novices reacted to unprecedented disaster with unprecedented nerve, bravery and barely precedented success.
Because the fact that England are in the World Cup quarter-finals, facing Sweden in Samara on Saturday, is not even the half of it. Never mind that this will be their most winnable quarter-final since Cameroon at Italia ‘90. Forget any questions about whether they would rather face Croatia or Russia in the Moscow semi-final next Wednesday. All that must wait, at least for a day or two. It will take some time to get over this.
Not just because England won on penalties, a draining 4-3 comefrom-behind shootout that was its own drama, with its own arc of what felt like imminent failure before eventual rescue and triumph. This was their first shootout win since Euro ‘96, their first ever in a World Cup.
Eric Dier’s winning kick, skipping past the desperate hand of David Ospina, will be an immortal moment in English football history. So should Jordan Pickford’s save from Carlos Bacca that came just before it.
Gareth Southgate loves to talk about how this new generation are free from the mental scars of the old lot, and should not be burdened with the old failures of the past.
None of these players were at Bloemfontein or Gelsenkirchen or Shizuoka or Saint Etienne. That is English history but it is not their history and they are not tied to it. And to see Harry Kane, Marcus Rashford, Kieran Trippier and Dier bury their kicks like this, in front of 40,000 screaming Colombian fans, with a place in the quarter-final on the line, suggests Southgate might be right.
But the importance, the thrill long before Dier’s goal, Pickford’s save or any of extra-time. Because England suffered a trauma that looked to have floored them.
They were 1-0 up from Kane’s penalty early in the second half. They were digging in and hanging on, but they were two minutes away from a win that would have been hailed as mature, professional and tiringly hard-won.
They were so close that everyone here at Spartak Stadium and back home started to visualise about Sweden, Samara and beyond. Not out of arrogance. That is just what people do when they can nearly touch something they want, when they get that close.
But Yerry Mina’s towering header up, down and back up again woke England up from those dreams like a cold bucket of water in the middle of the night.
Trippier and Pickford, two heroes of the shootout, collided on the line. Neither was able to clear the ball. By himself, each of them might have been able to. It is easy to say this now in the aftermath of victory but at the time it felt like the worst possible thing to happen to this young England team, a new mental scar for a new England era.
And in extra-time, England had looked utterly shot, unable to raise themselves from the canvas. In the first half of it, the Three Lions barely touched the ball as Colombia flinged crosses into the box. With better finishing, Colombia would have killed them off. England would be out and Southgate would be giving his post-mortem press conference in Repino this lunch-time.
It was all so different from the start of the game, back when this England team were attacking Colombia with an energy that was knocked out of them over the course of a draining match. In the first half, England kept attacking but kept coming up against the