All Those Oh So Nears

With England we used to know what was coming, we used to be clear on what we should expect at any major tournament… a humiliating collapse.

This time round though it felt so different for so long, with this team finding ways to win every game whether they were playing well or not it seemed to many that this might finally be the time we ended the years of hurt.

I started to truly believe in this Three Lions team during our incredible backs to the wall win against Mexico at the Azteca. Playing more than half an hour with a man disadvantage against a team that hasn’t lost for 13 years in their home, and extremely partisan, stadium but still managing to get over the line is the kind of thing champions do.

In Thomas Tuchel I also felt we had found the coach with the will strong enough to make the hard choices we would need him to make to bring the trophy home again.

Yesterday he proved me wrong as England reverted to type.

Of course we started the match really well and for the first 55 minutes of the match we even did a truly magnificent job of nullifying the greatest footballer of the last 20 years, then we scored…

This was our fatal error, just like it was in 2018, as rather than seeing the lead as proof that the plan was working we decided that we no longer belonged on the pitch and shrunk into our shells like a cast of Hermit crabs under attack.

Our wins against Mexico and Norway were the work of pure mentality monsters, but that must have taken all of our mental reserves cause the final half hour against Argentina was the work of purely mental morons.

We dropped deeper and deeper, stopped trying to effect the game at all going forward and surrendered every blade of grass outside of our penalty area to Argentina, as evidenced by the 12% possession that we had in the remainder of the match after taking the lead. TWELVE PERCENT!!!

Surrendering in that manner is something we only seem to do on the football pitch, Luka Modric punished us for it in 2018 and this time we surrendered to Lionel Messi….

Messi ran the show for the final half an hour and as soon as we saw that happening we all knew what was coming next.

The equaliser felt as inevitable as Thanos from the moment we surrendered the pitch so when it came the only emotion I was capable of was resignation that we were going out and low and behold the winner came in stoppage time and it wasn’t for us.

Up until now I hadn’t truly understood ‘all those oh so nears, weigh you down through the years’ but having now seen England throw away two World Cup Semi-Finals leads in the space of 3 tournaments, with 2 European Final losses wedged in between them, I understand it now.

It’s not even the losses that weigh me down the most, it’s that in 3 of those 4 losses when the pressure is on we took the lead only to throw it away and the hope of leading finally feeling like this time could be to one only for England to ‘throw it away, gonna blow it away’ just like we always suspected they would.

I didn’t watch the Third Place Match in 2018, I looked up who we lost it too whilst writing this blog cause I’d blocked the damn thing out of my mind, and I probably won’t watch it this time either cause I know exactly what to expect from England in these matches…. we’re ‘gonna throw it away, gonna blow it away’ like we have the last 2 times we’ve played this match.

I hope we can change our MO one day, but at least for now its the same old England once again.