NEW HAVEN – England may have beaten better opponents and have certainly had more glamorous nights, but there can be few that their players and travelling supporters will ever have enjoyed more. If you get out of life, love and knockout World Cup matches what you put in, this team is suddenly everything. It is hard to process that there could be three more rounds of this.
England suffered in altitude, suffered with a delay, suffered in the noise, suffered without the ball and occasionally suffered with it. They suffered from a red card and a penalty conceded. They were lions, warriors and gladiators to a man, the whole Roman gamut.
As the final whistle blew, they fell to their knees not because they had been broken, but because somehow they were still in one piece. All that running, all that fighting, all that clearing and all that counter-attacking quality.
I thought Thomas Tuchel had got it wrong. I think we all thought that he had, on some level. Defending that deep, with one less player, against the World Cup co-hosts in their own stadium, was surely asking for too much. Forget a Mexican wave; England were attempting to hold back the tide.
But they did it. Dan Burn made eight defensive contributions after coming on, the World Cup Harry Maguire for the ChatGPT generation. John Stones came on to play the hits, apart from that bit where we thought he had scored an own goal and our stomachs fell through our feet. They headed and booted and occasionally kept cooler heads and found passes to release the pressure.
