The Progress We’ve Made

Ten years ago England were dumped out of Euro 2016 by Iceland in the round of 16, having finished 2nd in the Group behind, of all teams, Wales… the only team we beat all tournament

This was off the back of finishing bottom of our group at the 2014 World Cup without winning a game, not an encouraging recent record for a new manager to come into, especially considering that we had only made it to the Quarter-Finals of a major tournament once in the last decade.

Little could any England fan guess that this national nadir was the spark that would lead to one of the longest sustained periods of tournament success in our nations history.

Gareth Southgate wasn’t the manager many fans would have naturally turned too after the Iceland humiliation, his domestic record as a manager being hardly sparkling, but it seems he was built for National Team management.

At his first tournament as manager he took us all the way to our first World Cup Semi-Final since Italia ’90, even destroying the biggest hoodoo dogging the psyche of every England fan by leading us to, of all things, a penalty shootout win…

A penalty shootout win just 2 years after the same team lost to Iceland turned so many of us from doubters into believers that the Semi-Final loss to Croatia felt soul-crushing, but given our recent history it’s incredible that we made it that far in the first place.

We kicked off our Euro 2020 having not made back to back Semi’s at major tournaments since making the Euro 1968 final four as reigning World Champions but we didn’t just make it to back to back Semi’s, we made it all the way to the final at Wembley.

This was our first major tournament final since 1966 and at Wembley too though the result of final day was not quite what we hoped for, how we lost to an Italy team that was in the middle of failing to qualify for 3 World Cups on the bounce I’ll never know but a final is a final.

We made it back to back European finals in 2024, for the first time ever, and in-between them we made it to the Quarter-final at the 2022 World Cup which was our worst tournament performance since that Iceland match.

Runs to a World Cup Quarter-Final, a World Cup Semi-Final and 2 European finals makes Gareth Southgate the most consistently successful manager in English history in terms of deep runs in tournaments, but that was also the problem…

So many deep runs had made us believe that a trophy was just round the corner heading into Euro 2024 and that made the defeat to Spain in 2024 the final nail in the golden coffin for Southgate, a victim of his own success.

That a loss in the Final was deemed a disappointment shows just how far we had come in 8 short years and now what we needed was a Man to get us over the line, so naturally we turned to a German.

Thomas Tuchel made his name as a manger in his home nation then had a brief stint with PSG before making his name known to us by taking Chelsea to back-to-back European finals and a Champions League title, now this proven winner turned his Midas touch to England.

Qualifying for this World Cup without conceding a single goal was impressive on it’s own, but what impressed me most before the tournament started was his ballsy squad picks. He didn’t go for the big names or the ‘best’ players, he went for the best possible team and to build a spirit within them that can’t be crushed like a tin can.

Starting this World Cup with a convincing 4-2 revenge job on Croatia sparked hope in all of us, never before had we seen England start a tournament with such confidence and command of the game.

Whilst the stalemate against Ghana brought some of the old fears flooding back to follow that up with a nail-biting victory over Panama to top the group filled me with belief that we were witnessing something we had never seen before from England.

Previous England teams had backbones of wet spaghetti when the pressure was on, but this team took that pressure and let it turn them into Diamonds…

DR. Congo sprang an early surprise on us in the round-of-32 but rather than shrinking into ourselves, as we would have done in previous tournaments, we came out swinging and got over the line thanks to Captain Harry Kane.

Then came the game that would have smashed previous England teams into smithereens arrived, Mexico in their Fortress Azteca.

They hadn’t lost in 13 years and with that history on their side previous England teams would have started the game already beaten, so obviously Tuchel’s tigers stood firm through the first half hour of gargantuan Mexican pressure before taking the lead through 2 goals in 98 seconds from Jude Bellingham.

At previous tournaments conceding just before half-time would have crippled England, despite that still leaving them leading 2-1 it would have broken them mentally and we would all have been waiting for Mexico to destroy us… but not anymore.

We not only increased our lead, having conceded, but we managed to do so having gone down to 10-men, against a partisan home crowd and a team that hadn’t been beaten in this stadium since before finished bottom of our World Cup group in 2014…

That isn’t the old England we used to know, it’s the new England we have become in the last decade of deep tournament runs…

Norway in the heat of Miami wasn’t the Quarter-final we would have chosen, but for the first time in many tournaments, everyone I spoke to about the game was expecting us to win and for the first time in a long time England lived up to expectations.

The next 2 matches might be the toughest we have faced all decade: first up are Messi’s reigning World Champions Argentina, then assuming we win that the chance for revenge beckons in the final.

Either we can avenge our Euro loss just 2 years later or avenge our Quarter-final loss 4-years ago, now wouldn’t that be something special just a decade after Iceland.

England started this decade off the back of the most embarrassing result since in 62 years and at the end of the decade they are two games away from ending 60 years of hurt, but the strangest thing about all of this isn’t the progress we have made along the way, it’s that many of us believe that the best is yet to come.