Lionesses use up all their lives to get past Nigeria

The better team lost, but that might quite not mean what what we think it does, in this case.

Nigeria were the better team for much of their game against England, yet they are on their way home after the European champions scraped through a penalty shootout following a goalless draw. This will widely be interpreted as a failure on England’s part, but to look at it that way might just be to misposition that frame in the first place.

Because Nigeria were another order, in terms that anything that England have faced in this competition, so far. They were stronger, fitter, better-organised and more skilful than any of the teams that England had played in their first three games of the tournament, but they were found wanting in two critical areas.

They played 35 minutes against ten players, yet felt like less of a threat to the England defence than they had while playing eleven versus eleven. Previously in the tournament, their win against Australia in the group stages was sewn up with almost twenty minutes to play while their other group matches had ended in goalless draws. They’d been set up to sit deep and deal with Lauren James. When she was sent off, they didn’t seem to adjust to go on the front foot and kill the game off. They hit woodwork against both eleven and ten players, but it wasn’t quite enough.

And then in the penalty shootout, the nerves seemed obvious in the wayward angles of the first three kicks. And two of those were Nigerian while only one was English, and in that’s how narrow the margins can be at this stage of a major tournament, as the USA found out to their cost a day earlier. Nigeria were the better team of the two, but England’s performance was also decent. They also showed courage, not least in getting through that 35 minutes a player short.

There was a big penalty claim at each end, which will be endlessly be picked at by VAR. Last season, my policy on penalty kicks was: “Has the referee blown their whistle and pointed to the spot? Yes? Right, then it’s a penalty”. I’ve refined that for 2023/24 to add the following: “But if you’re going to give someone a 75% to 80% chance of scoring a goal, then you’d better have a pretty damn good reason for giving it and the vast majority of penalties that are given fall some way short of my own person unreasonably high bar.”

And then there was Lauren James.

There is, perhaps, no position in which you can find someone more disconsolate than when a team loses a football match and one individual player knows that it was all their fault, and particularly when a moment of anger or petulance may be responsible for it. There’s no need for anyone to even need to say anything of this to James herself. Trust me. She already knows. Was it stupid/petulant/ill-advised? All of the above. But considering the amount of adrenaline flowing around a footballer’s body by the 85th minute of a big match, it is perhaps surprising that more don’t end up getting unnecessarily booted up the arse and stamped upon.

None of this is to excuse what she did, rather to point out that this level of self-control, in the event that one has that booting-up-the-arse temperament in the first place, is something that elite level athletes have to learn. Lauren James evidently still has much to learn, but it might just be that she has had a salutory lesson today. And she will be punished for it. She will miss the quarter-final, and if her one match ban is upgraded to three, as is widely-expected, her tournament will be over. That’s a hell of a price to pay, when for now there remains a possibility that the ultimate prize-winners medal.

But Nigeria can more than exit the 2023 Women’s World Cup with their heads held high, unbeaten in open play after having played one of the co-host nations, the 2020 Olympic gold medal winners, and the current European Champions. The professionalisation of women’s football is raising standards. The Nigeria squad playing in this tournament represent clubs such as Saint-Etienne, Reims, Houston Dash, Barcelona, Sevilla and Atletico Madrid. They are paid far too much little and some of their national FAs treat them disgracefully, but these are players increasingly used to a professional environment and the benefits of this are clear in terms of the rapid improvement of standards within the game.

Colombia or Jamaica now await in the quarter-finals, another game which previous performances in this competition have already confirmed England will not be able to take in the slightest bit lightly against one of two teams who’ve already impressed over the last three weeks. We shall see.