O K. So you’re saying there’s a chance. With 94 minutes of football already played at a clammy and frazzle AufSchalke Arena, with England 1-0 down against Slovakia and about to exit the European Championship in miserable fashion, with the entire Age of Gareth poised to sink into a toxic farewell, the range of possibilities for the next few seconds seemed fairly stark.
Forty minutes later England would leave the pitch victorious, 2-1 winners of their last-16 tie after extra time , drenched in the sweet, sweet sounds of Sweet Caroline, and ready now for a quarter-final against the Swiss on Saturday. They were propelled there by a stunning intervention from Jude Bellingham , and by an extra-time winner from Harry Kane as Slovakia briefly fell apart. How exactly, did we get from there to here? This was a moment of genuine double take, to the extent it even felt a little subversive.
English sporting failure has a rigid, unforgiving kind of shape. We know the muscle memory of these occasions too well. This is after all just people in shorts standing around doing things.
There was a circularity, too. Eight years on from the last great English men’s footballing collapse, the all-time low of defeat against Iceland in 2016 , England seemed to be turning Southgate’s final game at this European Championship into a repeat of the match that bungled him into the job as a replacement for the replacement. Here we had yet another bedraggled defeat against a likeable minor nation in blu.
