How England Threw Away Their World Cup Dream

Once again at a major tournament, England took the lead against quality opposition and failed to keep hold of it. This is how they fell short in familiar fashion.

England have done it again.

In quite impressive fashion this time, they’ve thrown away their World Cup dream and they only have themselves to blame.

Credit where it’s due to Argentina, who fought back valiantly, and deserved to win this feisty meeting with their bitter rivals, but there is no question that England let a monumental opportunity slip. They had a huge chance to beat the world champions and make it to the World Cup final for the first time since 1966. Instead, they threw away the lead they held until 85 minutes in to break the record for the latest a team has led in a World Cup semi-final but gone on to lose inside 90 minutes.

The saddest thing about this most painful of defeats is how clear it was – at the time – that Argentina’s goals were coming. England sank back immediately after Anthony Gordon had put them ahead on 55 minutes and then went entirely into their shells when manager Thomas Tuchel made a string of defensive substitutions, starting with replacing Gordon with centre-back Ezri Konsa.

That meant England had switched to a back five, as they had done heroically to see out the second half with 10 men against Mexico and then again for the final 10 minutes of extra-time against Norway. It worked against the co-hosts – against the odds, in truth – and it worked for a short period against a Norway side so knackered that they withdrew the best goalscorer on the planet in Erling Haaland. But against the reigning world champions, powered and inspired by the greatest footballer of all time in Lionel Messi, it was a total disaster.

It’s important to note that this turnaround wasn’t entirely Tuchel’s doing. His opposite number, Lionel Scaloni, responded to going behind with a string of attacking substitutions, and his players seemed to wake up after conceding, as they had done after going 2-0 down to Egypt in the round of 16.

Also, England’s players appeared to regress as soon as they went ahead, either due to fatigue after an hour of pressing high and defending so diligently that Argentina’s attackers had been kept completely quiet, or through pure fear. They had started dropping back before Tuchel intervened.

But even so, Tuchel had the opportunity to try to put even the slightest bit of pressure on their opponents, who they had hurt on the break with Gordon’s goal, and whose centre-backs were both on yellow cards. England needed a second goal, or at the very least some threat that they might go for another, because without that Argentina were able to dominate territory almost without challenge.

But instead, Tuchel brought on another centre-back in Dan Burn and a left-back in Nico O’Reilly for Declan Rice and Reece James. Burn went into the middle of the defence to add further steel and aerial presence in there, while O’Reilly was stationed in front of the actual left-back, Djed Spence, as a defensive left-sided midfielder. It was an incredibly defensive set of substitutions from which England never recovered.

There had been warning signs about sitting back this deep. Alexis Mac Allister had already hit the post and planted another header straight at Jordan Pickford. Nico González, who made a big difference from the bench for Argentina, also forced a fantastic save down low from Pickford.

And it didn’t take long after Tuchel’s substitutions for Argentina to equalise, and just seven minutes later they found a winner, scored by another of their subs, centre-forward Lautaro Martínez.

The statistics from the period between Gordon’s goal and Martínez’s winner are damning. England had just 11.9% possession, the lowest over more than a 10-minute period in any World Cup game on record (since 1966) by a team who were leading. Many of the teams in that list would have faced far more difficult circumstances, such as being a man down, or not having anything like the resources in player quality that England had on the bench.

They attempted just 38 passes in this period and completed only 26. They played 26.3% of their passes long, compared to 7.5% beforehand. Marc Guéhi led the team’s outfielders for passes attempted in this period with just six, and two of them were back to Pickford.

Argentina were completely dominant. The field tilt – which measures attacking dominance by comparing final-third passes for each team – speaks volumes. England made just four passes in the attacking third of the pitch, compared to 160 for Argentina. A field tilt of 97.6%, even over a short period, is almost unheard of, without even beginning to consider the fact that England had ambitions to be the best team in the world, or that they still had 11 men on the pitch.

That allowed Argentina to consistently find Messi, who had largely been ineffective before Gordon’s goal, in precisely the positions that he can affect games so devastatingly. In the 55 minutes before Gordon’s goal, he completed only eight of 14 passes ending in the final third and did not create a single chance. After Gordon’s goal, he completed 21 of 23 final-third passes and created three chances, setting up both of the Argentina goals to turn the match on its head.

The sole aim of Tuchel’s defensive approach was to hold out at 1-0 – against the tournament’s top scorers, remember – and it backfired.

The decision to bring on Burn was emblematic of the gameplan. He is a more than decent footballer who has played left-back at club level for good teams who keep the ball on the floor, and is sometimes rather unfairly categorised as little more than a physical asset because he is also very big and very good in the air. However, at this tournament, he was only used as an emergency defender to protect leads, with seven of his 16 touches before this game being clearances. And his job in the semi-final was again to help keep the ball away from Pickford’s goal.

Only, he didn’t touch the ball a single time anywhere near his own goal. He didn’t even touch it in his own half. He only touched the ball three times, all in the opposition’s half, all after he had been chucked up front as England desperately resorted to route-one football to try to find a late goal after going behind. In a display of how little England threatened the Argentina goal, one of his touches even came in the opposition’s box, which just so happened to be one more than any of Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham or Morgan Rogers managed all night.

This wasn’t a failure of Burn’s; it’s unfair to blame him for the problems caused by Tuchel’s decisions. But his performance and complete lack of influence on the game are illustrative of just how badly the latter part of this match went for England.

There was no attempt with the substitutions to address the fact England were doing a poor job of trying to keep the ball. They had no out ball and nobody even attempted to carry the ball far enough up the pitch to give the defence even the slightest break from Argentina pressure. Would Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford or even both have given them more chance of doing that?

It might seem easy to suggest it after the act, but it also appeared obvious to many of us while the game was unfolding, too. As Argentina piled forwards, space would have opened up for fresh attackers to exploit. Instead, Tuchel waited until after England had gone 2-1 down to try addressing his side’s lack of threat.

England under Tuchel were meant to be different. Having established themselves as a team who consistently goes deep in major tournaments under Gareth Southgate, they were supposed to now look at home under pressure against the best.

But they showed beyond any doubt here that the same problems remain. Just as was the case against Croatia in the 2018 World Cup semi-final and the Euro 2020 final against Italy, England went ahead but could not deal with the pressure and expectation that came with a lead, and went on to lose. They have now been eliminated in all seven of their World Cup knockout games since 1998 against an opponent ranked among the top 10 teams in the world.

There appears to be a deep-rooted problem with England’s mentality that they struggle to get past. It seems bizarre to say it but, based on how dreadful they were after going ahead, England might have done better in this match had Gordon turned Rogers’ cross wide of the post.

Had that happened, they may well have felt buoyed by that moment and been given belief that they could find a goal. They would have continued to try to create chances.

The only problem is that had they then found that goal, they still would have turned to the same defensive approach to sit on their lead, and the evidence in Atlanta very much suggested they were incapable of protecting it, even if they had had to for much less time.

If England are ever to succeed on the biggest stage, they need to start acting like a team who deserves to be in the latter stages of this tournament. Without doing so, they will never become one.

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