Before England’s first World Cup semi-final on foreign soil, against West Germany in Italy in 1990, The Sun’s appeal was like something from 1939. “Help our boys clout the Krauts!” its headline read. Of course the Germans won.
Before England’s second, again there was a (perceived) attack on the opposition. This was the Russian World Cup in 2018 and a couple of mild articles speculating that they were tired made Croatia rage. After Croatia’s victory, the normally gentle Luka Modric thundered that the English “should be humble”. Vedran Corluka swept past English journalists in the mixed zone. “It’s not coming home,” said the centre back, without breaking stride.
The dynamics before England’s third semi-final abroad are different. The story is not about them having been arrogant but rather diffident, and not the opponents feeling belittled by the English media, but rather England themselves.
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Gareth Southgate admitted his team had been “fearful” in their early games at Euro 2024, “almost concerned about what could go wrong”. It was a return to the bad old days, he suggested. Weighing on his players was expectation, he said, and feeding their fears was a negativity “being reinforced so vocally and actively outside”.
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He moved on before you could say “Gary Lineker”, though, and said talking things through as a group has helped to flip the mentality. The evidence was in Jude Bellingham’s audacious 95th-minute overhead kick against Slovakia and the five nerveless penalties smacked home in the shoot-out win against Switzerland. Now England are “very much in a ‘what’s achievable, what’s possible’ ” mode. His challenge to the players is to “build on” the quarter-final victory over the Swiss where “we saw a truer reflection of ourselves”.
England pressed better, had greater tempo and played higher up the pitch — but further improvement will be required to reach the final, and it will take even more improvement again to win it. Against Switzerland there was still a period of panic-ball when the Swiss pushed up their centre backs and forced England deep for 30 minutes at the start of the second half. In that period, decisions were poor and the passing was fearful. An abiding memory will be of Kyle Walker, the side’s senior pro, giving away possession, getting it back and just giving it away again.
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Southgate’s point about scared players and how “we haven’t had that for years” evoked the England before he took over. Watching on when the Three Lions were humiliated by Iceland at Euro 2016 was Stuart Lancaster, then head coach of the England rugby union team, a confidant of Southgate. When Southgate took over, to help him, Lancaster shared with him the work of Gazing Performance Systems, mindset specialists who worked with the All Blacks.
Gazing talks about “red head, blue head”. Red head describes someone with blood rushing to their brain, whose decision-making goes haywire, while blue head is the competitor in a cool mental state. At the Westfalenstadion with its “Yellow Wall”, facing a team nicknamed Oranje, blue heads are what England require.
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With that in mind, there is reassurance in having Luke Shaw at last ready to start a match. His calm and easygoing confidence shone in his press conference on Monday, and he’s a remarkable competitor. Across ten years of playing for England, 37.5 per cent of Shaw’s appearances have been at major finals. Shaw saunters in for the big stuff.
Surely he starts — though never rule out Southgate picking Kieran Trippier. Marc Guéhi’s return from suspension will strengthen the left side of England’s defence but Shaw on the outside would take it to another level. And having a strong left side seems particularly important against Holland, whose right flank is the key to their system, which transitions from 4-3-3 to an attacking 3-4-3 when Denzel Dumfries jumps from right back to right winger and Steven Bergwijn moves infield alongside Xavi Simons as a second No10.
The question is whether Southgate sticks with 3-4-2-1 or reverts to 4-3-3, with the former likely. Not in question, despite noise about his performances, is whether Harry Kane starts. With the striker having scored six goals in ten appearances against Virgil van Dijk, 65 goals for England and 44 goals on German soil in the past 11 months, Southgate may have a case for trusting him. “If you look over the last couple of tournaments, there’s always been at some stage question marks over my fitness or form,” Kane said.
“I criticise myself as much as anyone and know there have been times, for sure, when I can do better and move better, especially in and around the box. But if you’d spoken to me before the tournament and said I’d have a couple of goals and be in a semi-final I’d have bitten your hand off. Hopefully I score a couple of goals [against Holland] and you’re looking at it in a totally different way. You’re top goalscorer [at the tournament] and through to a final. But I can only do my talking on the pitch.”
For Bellingham, there are mixed conditions: a referee, Felix Zwayer, he clashed with bitterly in the Bundesliga but then again the stadium where he arrived as an EFL teen and left as a galactico after three years with Borussia Dortmund. When you think of Bellingham’s bursts of brilliance amid otherwise becalmed performances, or Kane awaking from his slumbers to score the winner against Slovakia, or Bukayo Saka’s electric interventions in the Switzerland match while team-mates toiled, you consider Erik ten Hag’s portrayal of Southgate as a manager who “sits back and relies on moments”.
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It was intended as a sneer but isn’t the international game, and especially tournament football, all about “moments”? There is less time and scope for coaching philosophies and playing patterns. Argentina won the World Cup on Lionel Messi moments and Didier Deschamps’ France have turned the football of defend-then-win-in-a-moment into a minimalist art form. When Southgate keeps a tiring Bellingham on, or sticks with Kane, or matches up so Saka can go one v one, he has their ability to produce big moments in mind. Of course England want to play better, Southgate said, but they survived the early games through ability to “grind it out on the pitch”.
The Dutch are having a style debate too. Rafa Benítez, as Uefa technical observer, reported on the difference Wout Weghorst made as a substitute in their quarter-final with Turkey, through clever movement that stretched the opposition and allowed Holland to suddenly make 17 runs in behind in 30 minutes while going from 1-0 down to 2-1 up.
Weghorst is now his country’s all-time third-highest goalscorer off the bench but the land of Total Football aspires to more than relying on a footballer once dubbed “Nout Workhorse” by Richard Keys. Noting that the Oranje got to face France without Kylian Mbappé, Poland without Robert Lewandowski, Romania when Ianis Hagi sustained a head injury and Turkey without the talismanic Merih Demiral — and ended up on the “easy” side of the draw by finishing third in their group — Ronald Koeman has been branded a gouden pik.
It’s a Dutch expression to denote a lucky man and literally means someone with a “golden dick”. A column in the Rotterdam newspaper Algemeen Dagblad asked who has the biggest gouden pik, Koeman or another supposedly famously lucky manager, Louis van Gaal.
As a player, Koeman was the controversial author of an English humiliation when he questionably escaped a red card to score in Rotterdam in a 2-0 win for the Dutch in 1993 that brought about Graham Taylor’s demise and stopped England qualifying for a World Cup. He was the manager when Holland beat England in the 2019 Nations League semi-finals and in their side when Marco van Basten destroyed England at Euro ’88.
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But Southgate played when England were brilliant against the Oranje at Euro ’96 and has taken his country to as many semi-finals (three) in six years as they reached in 66 previous years of playing tournaments. All England’s past four semis have gone to extra time, so be prepared.
“We’ve never been to a final outside our own shores,” Southgate said. “We’ve got to use this opportunity to change history as a motivation and that’s how the players see it. It’s their moment now.”
