So, rather than winning through to a first ever overseas World Cup final, England have instead been forced to wait 10 weeks before taking on Spain in a competitive international fixture.
The atmosphere at Wembley for the first Group 3 match of Uefa Nations League A on 26 September will, I suspect, not quite match what Thomas Tuchel and his team might have expected to encounter at the curiously named New York New Jersey Stadium – a venue seemingly renamed, albeit temporarily, in order to confuse cab drivers.
No, the Nations League will not cut it.
Even the Euro 2028 final, also at Wembley Stadium, should England reach it, or even win it, will not quite scratch the itch of losing out to Argentina on Wednesday night – not having led 1-0 in a World Cup semi-final with five minutes left.
Instead, we must look ever forward to World Cup 2030, the final of which will be held in Madrid. Or Casablanca. Probably. They haven’t decided yet.
But whether it’s the Santiago Bernabeu or the yet-to-be-named, yet-to-be-built 93,000-seater stadium at Benslimane, 30 miles outside of Morocco’s biggest city, we can certainly all look forward to repeated references to ‘64 years of hurt’ and images of Bobby Moore putting the Jules Rimet trophy on his head, as we try to convince ourselves that this time, more than any other time, THIS time, England can do it.
This is the routine of England’s perennial football disappointment – it’s cyclical soccer sorrow – destined to distract us England fans from our real lives until we meet our makers. Hope and disappointment on a ludicrous, lifelong loop. The search for the elusive second star.
Why do I do it to myself? I’m not even English.
And yet, deluded as we are, what joy these journeys give us! For truly, when it comes to following England, the pleasure absolutely has to be in the journey rather than the destination. And it’s not just the journey undertaken by that one team. It’s the passage of the whole tournament – a global footy-fest, a celebration of the sport we gave to the world, in exchange for all their commodities and artefacts and stuff.
Admittedly it’s of far more interest when England are still in it but I suppose, if we keep going out in the semi-final, that’s the whole four-year cycle minus three or four days. That’s the whole iced cake minus the cherry.
The high of the culminating tournament is at once both immediate – bringing an abundance of live drama into our living rooms, pubs and late-replacement leisure centres – and also permanent, eternally branding the sporting annals of countries large and small with narratives of nefarious simulation, errant technology and outright heroism.
The whole thing is like a soap opera that’s gone on for 96 years. In this latest episode, the old grandad – the one who keeps going on about what he did between the wars – was played by Uruguay, who pottered about a bit without really troubling anyone, before being waved off by the ghost of Asamoah Gyan.
One of the three hosts provided the comic turn, telling Iran to get out of his pub before drunkenly letting slip that he’d bribed the police to let the party go on past a sensible hour. It fell to Belgium to provide the necessary sobriety.
A couple of new characters emerged. Curacao was a mere bit-part but made the most of it by heroically frustrating Ecuador. Cape Verde’s character was more fleshed out, and showed how much damage you can do to crown-wearing Argentina if you keep having a pop at him. France provided some eye-candy, while Switzerland convinced the script-writers to enhance his role. Germany was expecting a bigger part until one of his best scenes was inexplicably left on the cutting room floor.
Italy is still in talks with his agent.
I can just about recall the final of the 1978 World Cup and then quite a bit more about Espana ‘82 but it was really with Mexico ‘86 that I dived in, properly ready to be that obsessive teenager. I gleefully filled in my Radio Times wall-chart, complete with the scorers, who had exotic names like Emilio Butragueno, Preben Elkjaer and Igor Belanov. There was misery and opprobrium for Bobby Robson’s England, followed by redemption in the shape of Gary Lineker – and then there was the maestro-villain Diego Maradona, who stole the show and kissed the trophy.
Italia ‘90 was never going to live up to that, and sure enough Argentina became the first country ever to fail to score in a final, which West Germany won with a single penalty.
USA ‘94 went ahead without England and finished with a 0-0 final and a penalty shoot-out and there was Argentina again to dump us out early in France ‘98, in a match I watched with my brothers and father in a French pub.
After that, I’m afraid it’s all a blur. Perhaps because of age or perhaps because living in the moment is the only way an England fan can stay sane, the tournaments have all merged into one since then.
I’m not the only one. I’ve found that football fans who, like me, are in their mid-50s can reel off the finalists of all the World Cups from 1978 to 1998 with considerably more ease than those from 2002 to 2022.
But I remember the general feel of each tournament and that is largely based on where I watched them.
Mexico ‘86 – at home with my parents. Italia ‘90 – the Salerie Inn. USA ‘94 – a student house at the end of a cul-de-sac in Whitstable, complete with Italian housemate. France ‘98 – at Glastonbury Festival and then on a boating holiday in France. South Korea and Japan 2002 – morning games on the radio while gardening on Brecqhou. Germany 2006 – evening games in the pub after gardening on Brecqhou. South Africa 2010 – following it all while working at the BBC. Brazil 2014 – seeing it through the lens of the creative team at Specsavers, relentlessly tapping into the fluid Zeitgeist. Russia 2018 – watching it all down under at ungodly hours, while cultivating curiosity in my son. Qatar 2022 – matches on a big screen here at the Guernsey Press. And Canada/Mexico/USA 2026 – the epic Stade de L’Esperance.
Yes, this may have been the World Cup in which we waved goodbye to Luka Modric and Cristiano Ronaldo but I’ll remember it as the World Cup when I finally encountered the lounge-stadium-pub hybrid created by my friends Richard and Julie.
Their sizeable and tastefully minimalist lounge – compared to mine, anyway – opens out into a garden with a big goal and room for some one-goalie kickabouts. Facing a screen bigger than some cinemas I’ve been to, they’ve built raked seating with a back row where attendees sit with little headroom below the ceiling. I can testify that attempting to leave this space too quickly, without accounting for the RSJ can be a challenge to one’s continued consciousness. I was warned, to be fair.
On the next level down are their sofas, where the more elderly – or early-arriving – patrons can watch Jordan Pickford screaming in luxurious comfort. Then there is another row of chairs and finally, at ground level, a long, school-PE-type bench on which the smaller kids can perch.
Surveying all this, our hosts plied us with drinks from the fridge and dispensed endlessly – with mixed throwing skills – from 48-packet boxes of Walkers crisps.
I missed the first five goals of England’s opening game because of a rehearsal. I caught their game against Ghana – albeit at my own home – and was left to reflect that the time could have been better spent rehearsing. I also saw the Panama game at home.
So my first visit to the Stade was for England’s first knockout match and even then, I missed half of it due to attending a sixth-form parents evening, where I wasn’t the only dad wearing an England shirt and biting his lip.
The cheer that went up as Harry Kane’s equaliser went in against DR Congo was as loud as any I can recall from those Grolsch-fuelled nights at the Salerie all those years ago. The winner was even louder.
It therefore surprised me that for the next game against Mexico, the folding doors were again wide open for a match that eventually kicked off at 2am. The neighbours have been very patient, I’m told. The turnout was remarkably good, with their eldest son being the right age to have lots of friends who either weren’t working the next day or could contemplate powering through.
For my part, after leaving as the sky was lightening in the east, I managed about five hours of work before having to go home in search of some Zs.
The Norway game was at a more sociable hour and featured the emergence of some genuine fake Norwegians, replete with historically questionable horned helmets, carefully braided hair pieces and a suspiciously strong Welsh accent. Their requests for pickled herring flavoured crisps went unanswered – yet still the unclaimed-prawn-cocktail-crisp mountain continued to grow.
It was another night of triumph for England, with a second successive final 25 minutes of backs-to-the-wall, last-ditch defending which garnered nothing but praise for togetherness, commitment and courage.
The same deep defending was breached, of course, against Argentina, meaning it was immediately rendered negative, tactically naive and cowardly.
I’ve long since realised that what really winds me up after these desperately disappointing reverses is not so much the result itself – Argentina deserved to go through – but the 20/20 hindsight of all the pundits and prognosticators who immediately seize the chance to form the narrative that suits them. Lionel Messi was the maestro, the conductor, the genius. Yet we were five minutes away from him being the fading star who’d given the ball away 18 times in the first half.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I watched the semi-final on my own at home and realised that it’s much more stressful that way. No banter. No random conversations to distract from the tension. I checked my pulse at one point and it was up at 97 – double my average resting heart rate.
Yet within a few short minutes of the final whistle, shorn of hope for another four-year merry-go-round, I was channel hopping rather than watch another grim autopsy of the English game, or the English psyche.
It shouldn’t be so hard to shake off, really. There are so many considerably more important things in the world to get agitated about than who got the ball in the onion bag.
But as Italy manager Arrigo Sacchi put it, ‘football is the most important of the least important things’.
Amid all the penalty dramas in the pubs, the underdog heroics among the olearia traversii and the comedy of the Chiellini/cannelloni ads, amid the eight-minute highlights packages, the commentators’ craftmanship and the folding away of the wall-charts, floats the dream of the ultimate triumph – the supreme wish that we dare not voice.
Imagine if we actually went and won it. Imagine it was us having that party, celebrating that unlikely winner, contemplating that generational moment.
It may never happen. Some will tell you it never will – England are just not good enough, technically or mentally, or both, they will say.
Maybe they’re right. But, you know, some countries have never been to a World Cup quarter-final, let alone a semi-final.
Maybe this isn’t such a bad place to be – a legendary World Cup win 60 years behind us, still worthy of some seductive storytelling, and a string of campaigns that have raised hope, knocked on the door and given us some exquisite moments.
That was a deft finish from Anthony Gordon. I enjoyed that.
