England closer to bringing ‘it’ home
With Sweden eliminated, Croatia is next foe in semis
SAMARA, Russia — There was little here to please the aesthetes, nothing much to arouse the adrenaline junkies.
But after 90 straightforward, some might say dull, minutes of soccer Saturday, England and its fans were awakened to this invigorating new reality: The team, young and until now unproven, is headed to its first World Cup semifinal since 1990.
All it took were two headed goals and two strong saves for England to produce a competent, uncomplicated and sometimes uncompelling 2-0 victory over Sweden. Now the second-youngest team at the tournament — with an average age of 26 — is in striking distance of the final.
England will face Croatia, who beat Russia on penalty kicks, in a semifinal Wednesday.
“We’re not the finished article,” England’s manager, Gareth Southgate, said. “We don’t have renowned, world-class players yet, but we have lots of good, young players who are showing on a world stage that they’re prepared to be brave with the ball, try to play the right way and have showed some resilience over the last few weeks.”
The England fan base in recent days has been rallying around a catchphrase — “It’s coming home” — that seemed at first to be cried out with a tinge of irony. It was the product of a perspective established and hardened through
years of disappointment at the World Cup; now, increasingly, the slogan appears to harbor a sense of earnest expectation.
More and more people have jumped on the bandwagon, succumbing to the team’s charms.
The spiritual figurehead of the team in many ways has been Southgate, a former England player whose self-effacing enthusiasm has become central to the group’s appeal. With a subtle knack for storytelling, he has done as much as any columnist to build a narrative about his players as lovable underdogs.
About their ambition to reach the final, rather than to play a third-place match after losing in the semifinals, Southgate said: “We spoke to the players today that none of us fancied going home. We’ve got to be here for another week, so it’s up to us the games we play in.”
And asked about uniting their country during a period of political division, he said, “All these players come from different parts of the country, and there will be youngsters watching at home from the areas that they come from who they’ll be inspiring at this moment, and that is of course even more powerful than what we’re doing with our results.”
The road to the final has looked surprisingly open for England for a while now, thanks at first to an easy group stage and now because of a series of fortuitous results in other games. England, with a different series of outcomes, could have faced Brazil or Germany in the quarterfinals and Spain in the next round.
For all the perverse joy that neutral fans may have found in seeing the fall of the tournament’s traditional titans, it created the possibility for more games like the one Saturday — a scrappy affair, with fewer dimensions. Neutral fans looking for an entertaining game here never stood a chance.
The Swedes’ approach to this match threw a wet blanket over whatever possibility the occasion might have otherwise presented. On defense, they set up deeply and densely inside their own half, allowing England space to move outside on the wings but not much room to burrow through. The Swedes probed forward infrequently, and in straight lines.
Sweden had advanced this far by playing this way, engineering soul-sucking, if ultimately praiseworthy, victories over South Korea and Mexico in the group stage and against Switzerland in the round of 16. “I respect Sweden’s style of play,” Mexico’s manager, Juan Carlos Osorio, had said after his team’s 3-0 loss, “but I don’t agree with it.”
And England’s goals Saturday, one in each half, seemed to do little to get Sweden to change its approach.
The first goal came in the 30th minute, when Ashley Young floated a corner kick from the left side, spinning the ball toward the penalty spot, where Harry Maguire rose over the back of Sweden’s Emil Forsberg and thumped a header into the left corner of the goal. It was England’s 10th goal of the tournament, and its eighth from a set piece.
England struck again in the 59th minute, when a looping cross from Jesse Lingard, and a lapse in defense from Sweden, released Dele Alli alone on the left post to deposit another header into the net.
“They’re heavy, forceful, well organized,” Sweden’s manager, Janne Andersson said of England. “It’s a good football team. I believe they are perfectly able to go all the way.”
Sweden’s two best chances to score were denied by goalkeeper Jordan Pickford, who was named the man of the match for his efforts.
He made his first spectacular save only moments into the second half, diving at full stretch toward the left post to divert a dangerous headed shot from forward Marcus Berg. The other came moments after England’s second goal, when Pickford laid himself out again, this time to his right, to bat away a low, hard shot from Viktor Claesson.
“Nothing fazes me,” Pickford said about the game’s high stakes. “The pitch is always going to be the same lines. It’s the same goal height. It’s just the game of football.”
In the final moments of injury time, the England fans joined together to sing “God Save the Queen,” although the celebrations on the field at the whistle were relatively subdued.
Most important, England had ticked off another box, had done its job. One more victory, and the country will play for its first World Cup trophy since 1966.