Fuck, Did We Give That a Good Go

In the end, it was the end that did for England. On that familiar sortie out along the home strait, England ran into the ice, scuppered from below by a presence that those so high up beyond the wheel, wet eyes trained on the stars, failed to even dare see coming.

England's World Cup is over. There is a basic and unavoidable sadness in this, one that anyone who has invested themselves in this strange process will be unable to shake until the summer itself is on its last, shellshocked legs. And yet, letting this overawe the senses of hope and communal euphoria that have come in the hours and days and weeks before would be wholly dishonest, a betrayal of the sincerity that emerged from your throat and gut when the team that looked like you and tried like you won as you only wished you could.

Take a strictly linear view of time – as seems to be the vogue these days – and yes: officially, England have crashed out of Russia 2018. But zoom out, soften the lens a little, and all those humid moments of the past month start to blur from a distance into one the shape and outline of the power surge that tore, this June-July, through a country leaden with obsessive tribal schadenfreude and division-drawn futility.

And in this gilded moment, we are still there, inching the punt out on to the lake at twilight, absorbing the dying embers of the sun, peering into the eyes of some doomed new crush as the wedding band plays on somewhere behind you in the mid-distance. I can see you, Zabivaka. Your brown skin shining in the sun. You've got your hair slicked back. And those Wayfarers on, baby.

I have never, as others profess to, been particularly moved by the voices of children. I find them shrill and their presence in public life largely irritates me. Yet as I bussed my way home through London as the dust settled on this latest English defeat, the only ambient solace I could find arrived in the words of a boy of seven or eight sat in the upstairs boss-seats of the 259. It would be OK that England had lost, he reassured his mum, because Arsenal hadn't played yet. When were the matches with three teams playing at once going to start? The latter was something I used to ask my dad when I didn't care about football at all, when all I wanted from him was attention, and all I had were questions that didn't deserve an answer. There was something poignant about hearing it again 25 years later, the sense of a pinball rattling round in that tender space between sadness and the awareness of sadness that I found oddly comforting, the sky outside turning the kind of colour that Blue Note jazz musicians spend their lives trying to conjure.

There will be plenty more tears for him.

A few days before, the Osprey helicopters of the American secret service had circled in these skies, dabbled their rotors in the green ink of England's heavy tournament weather. At the time, the visit of a President felt like an unnecessary distraction, something that was getting in the way of the far more important job of cradling our anxieties about English football's first semi-final in a generation. Nevertheless, the apparition of those strange machines felt sadly thrilling, erotic even, the awe from the sky that perhaps we all knew we'd need to see our way past Croatia and through the trap door to a new and exhilarating kind of relief.

In the end, the skies were no help to us, both in a figurative and metaphorical sense. The long punts up-pitch that characterised England's last hour and a quarter never looked like causing problems to anyone but us, the equivalent of letting a man punch you in the face then throwing his knuckle-duster straight back to him. Meanwhile, the authority conferred upon the referee felt like an aberration, and if Glenn Hoddle's strange assertions back at the turn of the century could ever be proven right, Cuneyt Cakir will surely find his next life blighted not by tragic disability, but an endless stream of minor irritations: bus drivers closing the doors too early around his face, loosened salt shakers, an overload of learner-driver backup Sundays. He was abject here, but in truth so were England for at least 30 minutes.

But in those opening 45 minutes, fuck did we give them a good go. From the moment Kieran Trippier's free-kick eased its way into the netting onwards, the first half felt like an Impressionist waltzer ride of positive forward motion, the best 45 minutes by far of England's long, hot summer. There were moments to savour all through the ranks: Ashley Young's saving slide tackles, Jordan Pickford's well-intentioned bollockings, Raheem Sterling’s fizzing runs, Harry Maguire’s massive slab head, Kyle Walker’s breathtaking recovery pace, Harry Kane’s never-ending bleep test shuttles between the number 9 and 10 positions.

It would be wrong to characterise this period of English dominance as something wrought upon Croatia by individuals; for the longest time, the waistcoat boys had them as one by the throat up against the bike sheds, but they didn’t take advantage in the way that more experienced tournament sides would in the situation, a series of promising breaks and gilt-edged chances going begging. In the end, it was England and not Croatia who looked fatigued, and Modrić and the rest of his side’s golden five started to play the game they wanted to play. As long as we let them do that, there would only be one winner.

The cold, hard truth of the matter is that England should have killed the game in that first half, but it’s easy to say that now, this far down the road, thanks to the initial blast-off of a last-minute winner versus Tunisia and the exorcism of a shoot-out victory in the Round of 16. Football is a game of fine margins, and that’s what we will return to for now, shorn of that irresistible but irretrievable momentum captured briefly in runs like this one deep into the Russian high-summer, aided by the late-running benefits to the script and ambience that playing in Group G rather than Group A can provide.

As the sirens scream through my bedroom window and another pollution sunset drops in around the shoulders, you hope that this at least banishes the tabloid ghosts that have haunted England in so many pivotal and frivolous moments, that the recriminations and effigies can be replaced by memories of the togetherness this squad of 23 and their chaperones have shown, the serenades, the bond and the bravery to run and to push and to pass till the last. This young side feels like one that ought to have earned the right to play free from the shackles of failures gone by, to banish the spectre of that third team of English ghosts that till now had always seemed to take the field alongside us.

Maybe if Southgate's England showed us anything of any lasting worth, it’s that the years of hurt might not be so bad a place to exist at all – that perhaps there’s a quiet and humble beauty to be found dwelling down here, a chance to learn, even, and for something new and more intimately acquainted with the feeling of winning to blossom one still and humid summer night to come.

@hydallcodeen

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