Gallantry and honour in heartbreaking shoot-out loss
Bobby Robson’s side ran out of luck and painfully lost to West Germany, recalls Rob Bagchi Told to mark Matthaus, Gazza said: ‘Smoke your cigars and leave him to me’
Twenty-two days was all it took from the morning after England’s draw with the Republic of Ireland for the country’s biggest selling newspaper to change its tune from “Bring em home” to “Bring it home”.
In July 1990 England’s first World Cup semi-final for 24 years was the occasion not only for a media “reverse ferret” but also an opportunity for vindication. Bobby Robson, the sadistically maligned manager, had finally devised an enlightened strategy, which gave a squad of gifted, resilient players a coherent, fluid formation and fed an optimism that hope could triumph over experience.
Although a wonderfully assured performance with three at the back against Holland in their second group game was followed by a dispiritingly sterile 1-0 win over Egypt, the 119th-minute victory against Belgium in the round of 16, secured by virtue of Paul Gascoigne’s vision and David Platt’s balletic volley, and their tenacious fightback from 2-1 down in the quarter-final against a mesmerisingly sinuous Cameroon attack revealed their skill and fortitude. Here was the proof that would inspire the key line of Three Lions, the plaintive yet defiant: “But I know they can play.”
England may have been let down by excessive caution or the 11th-hour loss of Gordon Banks or diddled by the Hand of God but each time they had highly capable players and now, at last, they were showing it.
For all the buoyancy, the obstacle between England and the final was truly formidable. West Germany, the kings of tournament football, had made it through to the previous two finals despite obvious flaws and they had played all five of their previous matches at San Siro, home of Inter’s Lothar Matthaus, Andreas Brehme and Jurgen Klinsmann, a mere 90 miles east of the Stadio Delle Alpi, venue for the semi-final. Their victory against Holland in the last 16 had been an intense, sour game but over in 90 minutes, while their defeat of Czechoslovakia was a masterclass of measured efficiency. England, by contrast, had been taken to extra-time twice in draining ordeals and zigzagged the peninsula with their baggage train from Sardinia to Bologna to Naples and back to Turin.
Small wonder they were shattered. In 2014 Gary Lineker recalled his fatigue: “We were exhausted,” he said. “Even on the morning of the game, my legs felt almost gone. Physically we’d been running on empty.”
But one player remained as irrepressible as ever. During their four weeks away, Gascoigne’s dread of boredom had, among many episodes, provoked him to wrap himself in bandages and spook his manager into believing he had fallen off a balcony, almost choke after stuffing 26 sticks of Wrigley’s gum into his mouth and, 48 hours before kick-off in Turin, implore Robson to let him finish an illicit game of tennis when he should have been resting because he was “6-5 up in the fifth set”.
When given his assignment to stick close to Matthaus, he told Robson to “smoke your cigars and leave him to me” but asked Chris Waddle as they left the room: “Who the f--- is Matthaus?”
Their midfield duel would be the focal point of England’s best performance since their defeat by Brazil in Guadalajara 20 years earlier. Gascoigne was electric from the start, drilling a shot at the goalkeeper, Bodo
Illgner, shimmying past sweeper Klaus Augenthaler before shooting into Jurgen Kohler, Cruyff-turning Klinsmann and, to cap it all, nutmegging Matthaus. For all his enterprise and initiative, he still did his defensive work diligently, making Robson’s heart swell. Waddle, too, was magnificent, but West Germany took the lead in the 59th minute when Brehme’s free-kick from 22 yards hit Paul Parker and looped over Peter Shilton, caught, as he put it, “in no-man’s land”.
England were not cowed and fittingly it fell to Parker to create Gary Lineker’s equaliser with a cross that the forward cushioned on his thigh to manoeuvre Thomas Berthold and Augenthaler out of his path and fire a left-foot shot past Illgner with 10 minutes to go.
The drama of extra-time, for the third England game in succession, was enhanced by West Germany laying siege for what seemed like a lifetime, Waddle’s superb shot that hit the inside of the post, Gascoigne’s deserved booking for fouling Berthold and subsequent tears that sealed a nation’s love.
West Germany had won shoot-outs en route to the final at two World Cups while England were enduring their first. At 3-3, Robson’s “banker”, Stuart Pearce, went hard and straight. Illgner saved with his legs and, then Karl-heinz Riedle scored West Germany’s fourth. Waddle walked up in fifth place, deputising for room-mate Gascoigne. “I felt like I was stepping off the world into silence,” he said. He opted to blast it but, overcome by anxiety and tiredness, leant back and fired it into orbit. The great adventure was over and all that was left, said Robson, “was the solitude of defeat”.
Defeat did not feel so disconsolate over the coming days and years. There was gallantry in it and honour that afforded them heroes’ homecomings.
The man with a hand in both England goals summed it up best. “We did not have the rub of the green,” wrote Parker, “but then we had used it all up in the previous two
fixtures.”