We can now end our agonising over timing and temperament
The exorcism is complete and this game will be character-forming for England
When Jordan Henderson’s penalty was saved, all England’s ghosts came teeming into this stadium. Same old misery. But the team of today are not bound by the failures of yesterday. History is only the backstory and was powerless to prevent England striding on to a quarter-final against Sweden in Samara.
England’s first tournament penalty shoot-out win since Euro 96 was an exorcism, and now we can stop with the endless agonising about timing, technique and temperament. The dead-ball calamities of several decades had become a self-fulfilling prophecy: understandable, but also nonsense, because the failing was curable with a rethink and a new set of players.
Gareth Southgate, who has been through the wringer of such cruel deciders, never accepted that England were congenitally bound to lose these stalemate-enders. All it needed was a bit of research into what England were doing wrong and some confidence in the ability of those firing the ball from the spot. Across his short reign, Southgate has worked to remove the old fatalism that many felt back home when Radamel Falcao placed the ball on the grass for the first of 10 strikes.
The unwatchability of it is rooted in England’s soul. The outcome is already known. And when Henderson took a perfectly decent penalty that was saved by David Ospina, the demons began dancing again. England had conceded an equaliser in added time, and now they were on the slide of doom. England trailed 3-2 as Mateus Uribe smashed his kick against the crossbar. Then Kieran Trippier scored well, Jordan Pickford saved brilliantly from Carlos Bacca and Eric Dier, whose substitute appearance had not gone well, passed the ball beyond Ospina to send England’s small band of fans into ferment.
A hand was lifted from England’s shoulder. Its finger pointed to Samara, venue for the Sweden game. As Harry Kane punched the turf, the injured James Rodriquez wept in the stands. The point has been made before: this World Cup has taken the usual arc of football stories and bent it into all sorts of unexpected shapes. England can now contemplate a last-eight game against Sweden and a possible semi versus Croatia or Russia. As imagining things is now allowed again, picture a semi against Russia: current political adversary, diplomatic sparring partner and highly efficient World Cup host.
England could do with a break from histrionic nights, and a quarter-final against the Swedes is enticing for that reason. Southgate’s men will hope to escape the bear-hugs and the smack-downs of the Panama and Colombia games and have a nice penalty-box debate with the Swedes about who should go through.
Southgate’s side will be too angry to agree with this, but this type of game is character-forming. It forces teams to deal with frustration and confront tactics outside the kind of coaching manual you would find at St George’s Park.
How good England are is a question tossed around on the wild seas of this game
We can all recite matches where England fell down the manhole of the unexpected. But they avoided doing so here for 90 minutes, because they have Kane to pull the trigger and defended much better than many observers expected.
They also largely held their nerve when the temptation must have been to turn it into a schoolyard scrap. They had no answer, however, to the mighty heading of Yerry Mina, who rose to meet a corner in added time and fired it into Trippier’s forehead. England’s right wing-back tried to deflect it over, but instead redirected the ball into his own net.
This battle of lemon-yellow shirts versus flaming red will surely tell every other team in the international game not to hand sweets to Kane, who has now scored six times in Russia. Colombia had only to look at recordings of the Tunisia and Panama games to know that