Things have been downright weird for England fans since the start of this World Cup. The team is young and carefree, apparently unburdened by years of failure. They pass the ball short instead of long. Toward the end of their first game, against Tunisia, with the score at 1–1, previous incarnations of the team would have panicked and huffed and lost their minds. This time around, Harry Kane, the captain, swivelled his hips and headed in a neat winner with a minute or two to go. On Sunday, Kane helped himself to a hat trick as England cantered past Panama, 6–1, in the sunshine of Nizhny Novgorod. These truly are times of great unnaturalness for English soccer supporters. Then, on Wednesday, Germany, the defending world champion, was eliminated. “There are certain events so apocalyptic that it feels they cannot just happen,” Jonathan Wilson wrote in the Guardian, in his report on Germany’s 2–0 defeat by South Korea. “They should be signalled beneath thunderous skies as owls catch falcons and horses turn and eat themselves.”
So it goes. The strangeness had deepened still further by the time England played their final group match, against Belgium, in Kaliningrad this evening. For months, it looked as though the game would be a crunch tie, which Belgium’s powerful, free-scoring players—many of whom play in the English Premier League—would probably win. But, because both teams had already qualified for the knockout round, it became a dead rubber instead. In fact, it became even less than that. Because of results elsewhere in the tournament, England fans noticed that, if the team lost to Belgium—and finished second in Group G, rather than first—it would end up in the weaker half of the draw, likely defeat Colombia in the second round, and then face Switzerland or Sweden in the quarter finals. This is crazy. But it is also how we think. (England has not won a World Cup knockout game in twelve years.)
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Belgium seemed to have got the message, too. The game was poor and disjointed. England had switched out eight players from their win against Panama; Belgium had rested nine. There was no Harry Kane, no Romelu Lukaku. At halftime, people wondered whether the teams might start collecting yellow cards, and try to underperform each other on fair-play points, another way to secure second place. Eventually, Belgium couldn’t stand it any more, and Adnan Januzaj, playing on the right wing, cut inside and scored a fine goal. This left England and its manager, Gareth Southgate—whose distinctive, tailored vest seems to adhere more tightly with each passing game—with a quandary: to try to turn the game around, or to go down quietly and reap the rewards.
The answer came in the sixty-seventh minute. Jamie Vardy, of Leicester City, slid the ball between two Belgian defenders and sent Marcus Rashford, of Manchester United, clean through on goal. Rashford, who is twenty years old, is perhaps the purest element in Southgate’s new England. He has a shiver of speed that seems to send him several yards before his feet have started to move. He scores goals in club football that fly in with particular directness. He is one of those young sportspeople who has the opposite of vertigo. Rashford scored two goals in his Premier League début for Manchester United, against Arsenal, in February 2016. It took him three minutes to score on his first start for England, three months later. Against Belgium, he ran onto Vardy’s pass. He was free. He took a touch, stooped a fraction, and bent his body, aiming to curl the ball beyond Thibaut Courtois, the long-framed Belgian goalkeeper. The strike was clean and hard. Courtois barely touched it, but it flew wide. Rashford was ashamed. He begged the referee to notice Courtois’s save, which he did, and England won a corner. But the ball was never going in. It was a bad miss. Or a good miss. England lost, and got exactly what it wished for.
