Euro 2024: the quarters, part three; England squeeze through, and disseminating it all remains impossible
There's no point trying to be rational about this team since they appear to defy analysis, but at least there was a nice redemption arc against Switzerland.
It almost feels difficult to recall in the warm afterglow of a penalty shootout victory, but there was a five-minute window last night when it really did feel as though the sky was about to fall in. With fifteen minutes to play of the match between England and Switzerland, Breel Embolo tapped the ball in from six yards out to give Switzerland the lead. Pencils were sharpened. Lengths of rope were fashioned into noose shapes. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, Mister Gawuff, it tolls for thee.
When England are crashing and burning in the finals of a major tournament, they usually like to leave a visual metaphor behind as they go. This can take one of several varying forms. It might be Ronaldo exaggeratedly winking for the camera, Frank Lampard’s shot dropping a couple of feet over the goal-line, or a torrent of racial abuse being thrown at their Black players, but there’ll usually be something left behind in our collective cultural experience of this team as the knives are sharpened and the green ink starts to pour forth.
The five minutes following Embolo’s goal felt like a volcano getting ready to erupt. Fumarolic activity was building. Reservoirs of magma were opening up. And then it came. The triple substitution. A final roll of the dice. Two attacking midfielders for defenders and a full-back for a midfielder. In desperation for something from somewhere, Mister Gawuff had sacrificed anything resembling a coherent team shape. Almost involuntarily, your thoughts started to turn to which images would be derisorily photoshopped for the following morning’s front pages.
It’s been a common theme throughout this tournament. If you can’t be good, be lucky. But can it be categorised as ‘luck’, if one of your players receives the ball to their feet, shuffles inside and bends a shot inside the far post so perfectly placed that the opposing goalkeeper doesn’t even really dive for it? It was their first shot on target of the night. It just happened to be perfectly placed, beyond the goalkeeper and bulging the side-netting, a goal born in Ealing but descended from Nigeria, a moment so startling that the element of shock and awe about it seemed to almost smother any celebrations.
Spin forward the best part of an hour and we were all back in familiar territory. The last ten minutes of the match had brought nothing to separate the two teams. Xherdan Shaqiri hit the crossbar directly from a corner in extra-time as England fell back into their apparently inherent conservatism once they’d hauled themselves level. It didn’t take long for the momentary sugar rush of parity to be replaced again by the return of that familiar slough of despond.
How a team and a country react to a match ending in a penalty shootout says a lot about the state of mind of that nation, and England still consider themselves to be uniquely incompetent at this particular form of psychodramatic test, despite the fact that they have actually won a couple in recent years. But we’re a long way from the days when coaches wouldn’t get teams practising penalty kicks out of some sort of warped ‘principle’ now, a very long way from players like David Batty being summoned to do something that they never ordinarily did because they were good at kissing a badge.
Those days are gone; it’s just that the rest of us haven’t quite caught up yet. These kids have been drilled. Their technique is as close to perfect as all the money of a Premier League education can make it, and their psychological resilience is clearly much greater than we probably believe it to be. It is natural that England supporters should recoil from penalty shootouts. Recent wins may have turned a corner, but most of an appropriate age can still recall the ghosts of 2021, 2012, 2006, 2004, 1998, 1996 and 1990 all too well. Muscle memory, it sometimes feels, can apply to the brain too.
All of which brings us back to the subject of Bukayo Saka, whose redemption arc turned out to be the dominant narrative of this particular match. It’s impossible not to be delighted about this, of course, but it should also serve as a reminder of how brittle any celebration can be. The energy expended could easily have gone in another direction, and we all know it.
But Saka awoke this morning as a hero in his home country, and that matters. The same could be said for Trent Alexander-Arnold, a player about whom people have opinions, or about Ivan Toney, whose ultimately decisive penalty kick, taken without even looking at the ball, might in a parallel universe have gone in another direction altogether.
So, in the final analysis, how ‘bad’ were England? The answer to this loaded question is probably that it’s impossible to say. Before the match, it felt that this match was probably too close to call. As such, that it should have ended up going to a penalty shootout feels like a good fit. They were decent in the first half, tailed off in the second, and then rallied in the closing stages of normal time to the extent that it felt as though they could snatch the win before slipping back into a rather too familiar pattern of over-conservatism.
But they’re in the semi-finals, and that’s something that 20 of the 24 teams which arrived in Germany three weeks ago cannot say. Have they been lucky? At points, definitely. If you’re relying on a 95th minute overhead kick to force extra-time, it’s difficult to suggest otherwise. But this is a thorny question. People who know the sum total of fuck-all about how football works tend to make the assumption that because they have a team studded with exceptional players they should win every match in swashbuckling style, when football simply doesn’t work like that.
It probably deserves 5,000 words of its own, but there’s a conflation of different factors which likely hint at England’s torpor this summer. Most significantly, there have been points at which the players have simply looked knackered. This shouldn’t be surprising. They start their seasons earlier than ever, with a ton of travel for pre-season tours. The majority play in the Premier League, which can at times resemble a team version of UFC. And the season is stretched at the end, to the extent that the Champions League final took place just days before the opening match of the Euros.
It seems at least as likely as not that Harry Kane is not fully fit. Kane had an ankle injury in March and an operation on his back in May. He scored 46 goals in all competitions last season, and the idea that he’s suddenly, in the last month, become ‘too old’ (or whatever) is fundamentally absurd. But to wonder whether his back operation may have required more recovery time isn’t fundamentally absurd, and it’s the most obvious explanation for his modest performances in this tournament. It’s also worth remembering that, despite everything, he’s still scored two goals more than the entire France team combined has from open play in this tournament so far and that it would, despite everything, still be a surprise to see him left out of the semi-final.
So this morning after the night before, they’re still in the competition. Is it typical English arrogance to suggest that the Netherlands could be beatable? Possibly. After all, the Dutch have won three of the last four meetings between the two teams, and England have only beaten them once since putting them to the sword so comprehensively in 1996. But historical records can easily be manipulated. Four of their nine meetings since then have ended in draws and the Dutch record in penalty shootouts is even worse than England’s.
In the meantime, England should probably sip at their haters’ tears while they still can. Every match in this tournament so far has felt like it could be the last opportunity to do so, and last night’s match was no exception.
It was certainly better at times than the previous 4 games, but this inability to create a shot on target before half time at least is going to bite them on the bum at some point surely? Riding the luck and that might be enough providing it doesn't run out before we win the final!