by They will always have Paris. Throughout this Nations League campaign the England team have been battling their own sense of entropy, still giving everything, still trying the same plans and processes in the hope that something will eventually break. And at 9.34pm on a very cold Wembley night, it ended. Ella Toone’s injury time goal earned England three points and kept their Olympic dream alive. But somehow it also did so much more.
He breathed life into a team and a cycle, and a moment that felt so much of the evening that it was drawing to its natural conclusion was an exciting centerpiece for a cast preparing for its final curtain call. There will soon be new challenges and new frontiers to overcome, a fresh batch of European Championship qualifiers in the spring, but for now this iteration of the Lionesses still has tricks up its sleeve, talent and creativity yet to be realized. fire that can scorch any team on the planet.
Related: Toone reduces the Dutch in England’s epic win to keep Team GB’s dream alive
As they came together so brilliantly to salvage a game that looked cooked after 35 minutes, running on fumes and adrenaline, fueled by the roar of the Wembley crowd, the cold air on their skin and the candle of quality flickering for Paris next summer, it. it was as if there was a kind of energy surging within them.
An energy that we haven’t really seen from them since they reunited this autumn, barely a month since Sydney’s trauma, and he’s still a little dazed and concussed.
Beth Mead came on for Chloe Kelly at half-time, Georgia Stanway moved further forward and made herself a threat in the penalty area, while old friends Toone and Alessia Russo worked from the bench. The Dutch went back further and further into the wide open spaces of Wembley, giving Lauren James the time and finish to dictate. James had a hand in all three goals, and as Toone ghosted in at the far post to provide the final success, Wembley made one last call to arms, one last push, one last effort only.
All in all, it’s probably worth pointing out that England weren’t very good for large parts of the game. And we were reminded that probably the biggest flaw on this side of their creativity and enthusiasm in the future is a lack of presence in both penalty areas, the physicality and the alpha energy to do the grunt work, to convert the crosses and head. away them.
Jess Carter had a poor game and was withdrawn for Esme Morgan after half-time, Alex Greenwood was too committed to the first Dutch goal and even the almighty Mary Earps fell to the World with a poor error in the first half.
But beyond personnel, an underlying brittleness seems to have permeated this team, a sense of melting surfaces and cracks in the ice. Sarina Wiegman talks a lot about defense against counter-attacks, because this is basically the key to the whole enterprise. Cut off the counter, and with England’s technical quality they can easily dominate. It is also the essential measure of how the team is performing as a collective: the effectiveness of the press, the closing of the angles, the command of space. Lineth Beerensteyn’s two goals were the kind that England had not conceded four months ago.
So England ran the ball around a bit and gave it away a bit and basically ran around trying to feel normal again, and on countless occasions Kelly or Hemp won the first or second ball, look up and see the area empty penalty of white shirts. . These are not issues of tactics but of cohesion and energy: the timing of events, the sharpness required not only to anticipate where the ball will be, but to actually reach it. You can still pursue it while running on fumes, but prove it: this requires thought and vision, clarity of mind to see the picture before it becomes reality.
And perhaps clarity is what this team has been lacking lately: clarity of selection, clarity of formation, clarity of mission and motivation. How much credit should we really give to the League of Nations, anyway? Is it primarily an Olympic qualification or something worth winning in its own right? In the end England was trying to answer these questions on the hump, and somehow they only managed to clarify their options to one – live or forget – they managed to recover their situation and their thoughts.
This whole post-pandemic international cycle – a Euro, a World Cup, the Olympics and another Euro squeezed into three years – feels like this kind of sadness dressed up as a panorama of opportunity. There is a school of thought out there that the fallow summer might not be the worst thing for this team: time to reflect and process, time to breathe, time to renew.
Instead, they now travel to Glasgow on Tuesday for one push. The mind is still frazzled. The bodies are screaming. But chaos and confusion never felt so sweet.
