Come Saturday, it will be 73 days since the pain and shame of Atlanta, when England, from a winning position in a World Cup semi-final, decided to do an England, and sit on their lead. What followed resembled a slow-motion crash test dummies video, Enzo Fernández first summoning the ghost of Andy Möller at Euro 96 with his high-camp cavorting celebration, and then Lautaro Martínez, unmarked, nodding home. Englishmen across the globe slumped, Croydon BoxPark fell deathly silent.
Allowing Lionel Messi the freedom of Georgia on the inside-right channel had turned out to be a critical oversight. An everlasting international break brings unwelcome flashbacks to the summer, the Nations League quadruple-header a soft re-entry to international football, though facing world champions is a severe test of credentials. Any Football Association bloviation of a best performance since 1966 in winning a third-place playoff game that resembled a hungover Soccer Aid, France not making a tackle in the first half, has done little to brush away the disappointment.
Plenty of blame to share around, and Thomas Tuchel more than happy to share it. His explanation for that battening down of the hatches has been a case of “it’s not me, it’s you”. The Tuchel version of events is that shovelling on Big Dan Burn with nine minutes to play was a reaction to players having already decided unilaterally to bunch up in front of Jordan Pickford and follow in the tradition of failures past.
Conjuring Sid Vicious’s thoughts on the man in the street, Tuchel has said 99% of fans don’t ask him about his Atlanta substitutions. To follow Tuchel’s narrative, there’s some corner of a foreign field that’s for ever an England player, exhausted, unable to complete a pass, gassing out. It is a compelling argument, plenty such cases to back it up, though was it not Tuchel’s job to stop it happening?
Analysis this week suggested the gassing out followed Tuchel asking players to run too hard in the group stage. A squad mostly coming off hard seasons in the grasp and grapple of the Premier League could not replicate such energy in the knockouts, their rearguard efforts against Mexico and Norway portentous preludes to facing Argentina. Entering a fantasy scenario, the likelihood is that Spain, who teased Argentina to the point of losing their rag, would have done much the same to England in the final.
They already did that in the Euro 2024 final. Spain enjoying 21st century success often sends root-and-branch reformers to ask whether England can learn lessons. But “we don’t have that strength like the Spanish, where we control games like they do,” sighed Anthony Gordon, now playing in Spain, memories of his goal in Atlanta bittersweet.
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