The Women's World Cup: 12th August 2023

It'll be Australia vs England in the semi-finals.

It’s a cliche to say as much, but a 25 yard wondergoal counts for no more than a scrappy stab-in from six or seven yards out. It wasn’t always pretty, as England edged their way past a clearly very talented but slightly blunt Colombia to get through to the semi-finals of the 2023 Women’s World Cup, and they now face a very stern challenge in the form of an away match against the hosts in the last four, against a team which is still slowly building momentum to what is starting to feel as though it could be quite a crescendo.

Australia and France packed most of the entertainment into the penalty shootout which followed their goalless draw. None of this to say that their match was boring in any way. When the hosts are playing in the quarter-finals of a competition where will always be a crackle of electricity in their air, the world living vicariously through the frightened hopes of a nation for whom shit is getting very real indeed.

And the penalty shootout was an absolute cracker. The modern men’s game trope of penalty shootouts ending with 23 goals before someone finally cracks and hits the post is boring. Penalty shootouts really come to life when everyone is losing their shit and there are no guarantees that their shots aren’t going to clear not only the goal bit also possibly the stadium itself. This one had everything. A retake, a goalkeeper hitting the post when scoring would have put her team through, and eventually the host nation edging through and knocking out one of the tournament’s strongest teams. It was certainly a bracing jolt of high drama for a Saturday morning.

So the hosts were through, and the quest to find their opponents wouldn’t end up being quite so much of a fingernail-shredder. England had much to be concerned about for their quarter-final match against Colombia. The team that had already knocked Germany out of the competition featured two or three of the tournament’s best performers to that point.

After 45 goalless minutes, stoppage-time brought all the drama. Leicy Santos found a little space on the right hand side and curled a glorious curling lob over Mary Earps and in, just under the crossbar. The debate started almost immediately concerning whether it was a ‘fluke’ or not, a mis-hit cross which had caught Santos out to the exact same extent that it had Earps.

It’s a very 21st century way of looking at football, to see something brilliant happen and automatically assume that the player who performed it couldn’t possibly have meant it, all the more during the half-time break, when the attention of ITV’s panel turned to blaming Earps for the goal. Of course, these days you can’t be seen to be overly critical, but you still end up in the same place.

“She’ll be very disappointed with that.”

Newsflash, football pundits who never played in goal: goalkeepers are always disappointed when they concede a goal. If you want to say, “It was her fault, she got it wrong”, just come out and say it. But there was certainly little space given to discussing the presence of mind on Santos’s part to think of it, having the confidence and imagination to veer from the system, and the spatial awareness—or even the peripheral vision—to have been able to see the angle in the first place and pull it off.

It was a perfectly placed lob, a shot that dropped at a fierce angle. Perhaps we should give a little more credit for these moments than reaching immediately for a ‘must have been a fluke’ narrative or yet another bout of semi-concealed concern-trolling goalkeeper-blaming against a player for not being three or four inches taller than she is.

But if the first goal that England had conceded in the entire tournament was a cue for some significant catastrophising on social media, it didn’t last for very long. Six minutes’ stoppage-time had been signalled for the end of the first half, and as the clock ticked over 51 minutes they were handed a lifeline when the Colombia goalkeeper Catalina Perez failed to hold onto a cross—about three times—before Lauren Hemp finally took the hint and bundled the ball over the line to bring them level.

When we talk about the psychological aspects of football, the end of this half feels as though it may provide an interesting case study, some day. Colombia had shaded the first half, and the psychological boost of such an outstanding goal can surely only have led to a huge surge of confidence and self-belief. But the equaliser may have punctured that, and it certainly felt as though Colombia couldn’t build on their first half performance throughout the early stages of the second.

And just after the hour, England took advantage of another slip to edge their way in front. Georgia Stanway threaded the ball through for Alessia Russo, whose first step pushed her marker into an unbalanced position and allowed her to slip past her, with a low shot past Perez as clinical as any we’ve seen in this tournament so far.

Colombia came back, but for all the individual talent in their team it never really felt as though there was quite the team cohesion required to collectively grind England down. The touches were often nice. The movement was often excellent. But there were also stray passes at critical moments, a little bit of running down blind alleys, and a demonstration from Earps that she had put the opening Colombia goal behind her with an excellent one-handed save from a Mayra Ramirez shot. And in eight minutes of stoppage-time they couldn’t really manage to come close to breaching a defence which remains one of the most difficult to breach in this entire tournament.

Australia vs England in a Women’s World Cup final feels like An Event, though the winners of this game may well be considered the underdogs in the final considering that Spain and Sweden, who meet in the other semi-final, have both been excellent, Spain’s snafu against the now-eliminated Japan excepted. But broadly speaking, this very open tournament reaches the semi-final stage with little to choose between those still involved.