Young squad’s run has fans believing again
Southgate’s team just two wins from first title since 1966
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 secondyoungest team at the tournament — with an average age of 26 — is in striking distance of the final.
England will face Croatia, which 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.”
‘It’s coming home’
The England fan base has been rallying around a catchphrase in recent days — “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.
Asked about uniting their country during a period of political division, Southgate 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 of the field, 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.
Pickford comes up clutch
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.
Their two best chances to score were denied by goalkeeper Jordan Pickford, who made a pair of diving stops to hold the Swedes’ scoreless and was named the man of the match for his efforts.
“Nothing fazes me,” Pickford said. “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.