WOW! FOR ME THE PARTY’S STARTED
DON’T get carried away, I’ve heard some people say. Sorry to disappoint those who are advising caution but I’m only too happy to get carried away.
I don’t care whether Panama were the opposition — that was a top, top England performance.
I spent the weekend on the Isle of Wight and watched the game in a hotel bar. If it started well for Gareth Southgate, it also started well for yours truly as I had pulled John Stones’s name in the sweep for first goalscorer.
The Robot never came out but you can imagine the celebrations were as lively on the little island as they were in Nizhny Novgorod!
But after the initial frenzy, there was a stunned disbelief about what we were watching.
England leading by five goals before half-time in a critical game at a tournament? This doesn’t happen. Yet what impressed me more than the score was the way we went about achieving the end result. You could see from the first whistle that Panama wanted to rough up our players. Jesse Lingard was kicked to pieces, Harry Kane was given some awful treatment yet everyone to a man reacted the same way, dusting themselves down and ignoring everything.
Look at how Harry put his first penalty away: he was getting intimidated from all angles, the keeper was encroaching — as were the Panamanian defenders — but he kept his nerve and could not have hit it any harder.
The confidence was jumping out of him. It is hard to keep your focus in the face of that kind of provocation but what you have seen from England reflects so well on Gareth Southgate, from the way he has coached his squad to how he has told them to behave. Everything he has done so far, from tactics to substitutions, has been first class. I know from speaking to Jack Butland at Stoke how many meetings Gareth will call during an international get-together. He wants them to know their jobs inside out and you can see how well drilled they are: the best evidence of that came with Stones’s second goal. Executing that type of free-kick is so difficult: the first pass has to be right, the weight of the cross to the back post has to be perfect; the runs to take defenders away to create space have to be impeccably timed. It only comes off if everyone knows what they are doing. There was so much to enjoy. I thought, for example, that Ruben LoftusCheek ( left) was very good. I love watching Loftus-Cheek. His power and pace at close quarters is frightening and he has got every attribute to be a top player for a long time.
This, however, has been a squad effort to get into this position ahead of the final group game against Belgium. They have emulated what our team in 2006 did, in terms of winning their first two matches but the comparison of what we did and they have done is like night and day.
We never built up any kind of momentum. Yes, we had beaten Paraguay and Trinidad & Tobago without conceding a goal but we didn’t win with convincing performances by any means.
We improved in our final match against Sweden and a 2-2 draw ensured we won the group.
By contrast, Gareth’s team go into Thursday’s date with Belgium absolutely flying. Long may that continue. It has been too long since we had a national team that got us off our seats and allowed us to get behind them. This one is giving us all the right signs. Let’s not keep a lid on those feelings.