Surprising twist in a soccer soap opera
Ever-hopeful England manages win over Tunisia
VOLGOGRAD, Russia — And on the fifth day of the 2018 World Cup, that great, recurring soap opera of international sports finally got its chance to begin again: The not-somighty but ever-hopeful English national team took the field.
Thousands of red-and-white clad fans had descended on this riverside city once known as Stalingrad for England’s Monday-night match against Tunisia. What they got was a nail-biting 2-1 victory that suggested that this time, as they have been promised, it really is going to be different for England. Harry Kane’s header from 4 yards out off a corner kick, just seconds into stoppage time, salvaged a game that seemed destined to become one more painful chapter in England’s major competition melodrama.
At the start, England took control of the match. A team that for years has relied on 60-yard balls down the wing that rarely connected put on a dizzying display of cutbacks, through balls and slotted passes. Tunisia could barely breathe, much less compete.
When Kane gave England the lead in the 11th minute, knocking in the rebound of John Stones’ header off a corner kick, England looked well on its way to a dominant victory. Uncomfortable heat in the stadium? No problem. Swarms of pesky bugs? No big deal. England had so much of the ball in the first half-hour of the game, it seemed as if the Three Lions would be able to win with just a single defender rather than the aggressive three-man setup it used.
But then, battling for a cross on one of Tunisia’s few ventures into England’s half, Kyle Walker put his arm in the face of Tunisia attacker Fakhreddine Ben Youssef. When Ben Youssef hit the turf, the Colombian referee Wilmar Roldán blew his whistle and pointed to the penalty spot. Ferjani Sassi nailed his kick past a diving Jordan Pickford, and the script looked eerily familiar.
“It goes to 1-all and the momentum changes a bit,” Kane said. “It’s always in the back of your mind that it’s going to be one of those days.”
If the World Cup’s substance mostly lies in the conversation that surrounds it, then it appeared that the talk about this match for years would be how England could have possibly have missed so many chances early on to put the game away.
In the first minutes, midfielder Dele Alli missed a clear chance from close range. Raheem Sterling couldn’t tap a crossing pass into an open net. Jordan Henderson bounced a header just wide. Later, Alli’s wide-open shot from 12 yards deflected out of bounds. Jesse Lingard’s poke past the charging substitute goalkeeper, Farouk Ben Mustapha, rolled off the post. Stones essentially whiffed on another wide-open shot from 10 yards out.
The second half brought more English dominance. However, emboldened by having survived one of the more lopsided 1-1 first halves in recent World Cup memory, Tunisia’s defenders started closing down the oncoming English attackers, clogging open lanes and clearing free balls out of dangerous areas. But a moment of sloppy ballhandling by Tunisia as regulation time expired gave England a corner kick in stoppage time, and a ball deflected off Harry Maguire toward an open Kane on the back post of the Tunisia goal. Whipping his head, Kane emphatically knocked the ball into the net.
“Maybe in the end you run out of time, but I thought we kept doing the right things and making good decisions,” England manager Gareth Southgate said afterward.
So what happens now? For decades, conventional wisdom has held that England suffers as much from irrational expectations as soccer deficiencies at the World Cup. This, the
thinking goes, is the result of a combination of factors regarding this proud, but often selfflagellating, nation that a) ruled a global empire into the middle of the 20th century, b) invented soccer, and c) once won the tournament, on home soil in 1966. Thus hopes rise every two years, for either the World Cup or the European Championship, that this will indeed be the year that the English Messiah, or at least some 21st century version of Bobby Moore, will lead the Three Lions back to the Promised Land.
The results of such exuberance have often been humiliation. Occasionally, England has departed with cruelty, beaten by Argentine gamesmanship, or by German or Portuguese penalty kicks. Even when a supposed
Golden Generation including Rio Ferdinand, Steven Gerrard, David Beckham and Frank Lampard was at its peak, the script never changed.
There were lackluster meltdowns in the heat of Ukraine and Brazil, and the pressurecooker of the 2016 European Championship in France. Each time, England’s team seemed to crumple. The defeat to Iceland at the 2016 Euros brought to the surface all manner of painful British sentiments about the retrenchment of a once great empire.
Chastened, and perhaps a bit wiser, England’s Football Association decided to flip the script ahead of this World Cup and usher in a new era of limited expectations.
No more foreign managers like Italy’s Fabio Capello or Sweden’s Sven-Goran Eriksson. In their place came the former defender Southgate, a seemingly hail-fellow-well-met with a middling résumé who got the job when his predecessor, Sam Allardyce, was fired amid a corruption scandal after a single game.
Southgate’s main credentials hardly signaled greatness would follow: His previous experience included managing Middlesbrough in a tenure that saw the club relegated from the Premier League and guiding England’s under-21 team to last place in its group in the 2015 European Championship.
He has found his footing with the senior team, losing only two matches out of 19 since taking charge. And with England breezing through World Cup qualifying, the FA dispensed with its usual bunker mentality regarding the country’s temperamental news media.
This time around, the team’s stars have spoken about coming to Russia with a goal of having fun. Southgate has framed this campaign as the first step in a process for one of the youngest teams at this World Cup, though that may be a tough posture to maintain after the élan England showed Monday night, its finishing troubles aside.
“There is a bigger picture, with a lot of young, good players who are hopefully going to be together for a very long time,” Southgate said ahead of the match. Translation: patience, please, because we might not be very good yet.