KANSAS CITY — The dartboard is still there, players taking it in turns to take down Peter Crouch with bonhomie or even a well-placed arrow.
The content boom that became such a crowd-pleaser during Gareth Southgate’s great English makeover is an easy icebreaker for media sessions, lightening the mood and loosening tongues.
The return to Kansas City post-Mexico was supposed to be about decompressing before rising again in Miami, where Norway await in Saturday’s quarter-final.
While there has been some of that, Morgan Rogers explaining the benefits of England’s home from home in the American Midwest to a Norwegian journalist tasked with a dispatch from inside the enemy camp, there is also a low thrum of electricity crackling about the squad, a sense that some cosmic force is driving England towards the ultimate finale.
As an observer of the Southgate years, you never quite got the feeling the team believed the message.
