They built them up as champions-elect and they, once again, came up painfully short when it mattered most.
After Kieran Trippier gave England the lead in spectacular fashion against Croatia the Three Lions proceeded to implode in their World Cup semi-final in a way that really only England can.
Captain Harry Kane finished runners-up to Mohamed Salah in the Premier League Golden Boot race last season yet missed chances against Croatia that he has routinely buried for Tottenham over the last three years.
Jordan Henderson had been likened to Andrea Pirlo by Rio Ferdinand after the Sweden game yet looked more like Alex Pritchard in the semi-final, while it turned out that England’s lack of goals in open play was actually a cause for concern and not a natural result of dominance like it had been recently touted.
England were intriguing to neutral viewers for a number of reasons: they had a young team. A young manager. They were ‘likeable’ as we so often heard throughout the tournament and they championed and thoroughly owned the most prominent hashtag of the entire World Cup – #Itscominghome
Politicians like Ed Miliband went on national radio to sing about it. Del Boy Trotter listened to Three Lions intently over the phone. Prince Harry said that the World Cup was coming home during his visit to Áras an Úachtaráin.
Prince Harry knows… #ItsComingHome #ENGCROhttps://t.co/4mf4lSP9hh pic.twitter.com/ETBJKeVZQK
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) July 11, 2018
It was a chant, a greeting, a song and quite rapidly it became a movement.
But then it came to a shuddering halt. Mario Mandzukic crept in behind John Stones in extra time and volleyed England out of the World Cup in front of 78,011 people at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, 24.2 million viewers watching on ITV and an average of 924,000 viewing the game on RTE2.
To contextualise those figures, an average of 866,100 viewers tuned into watch Ireland’s must-win World Cup qualifier with Wales in Cardiff last year.
The natural counter-argument to that comparison is that that was a qualifier and this was a World Cup semi-final but then you look at RTE’s viewing figures during the 2014 World Cup.
The 2014 World Cup final between Germany and Argentina attracted a share of 859,000 viewers.
Germany’s crushing 7-1 win over Brazil in that tournament’s semi-final returned 589,000 viewers. 698,000 tuned into RTE to watch Argentina’s penalty shootout win over the Netherlands in the tournament’s other semi-final.
The England game attracted more viewers than the All-Ireland hurling final and trailed only the Late Late Toy show, the All-Ireland football final and Ireland’s World Cup play-off loss to Denmark in comparison to the most watched Irish programmes of 2017.
Last night's #WorldCup2018 England v Croatia semi-final was watched by an avg. audience of 924,300 (61% share) on @rte2 with over 200,000 streams on @rteplayer. The peak figure was 1.12m and it was #1 for 15 to 44s. The final airs this Sunday from 3pm on @rte2 and @RTEplayer
— RTÉ Communications (@RTEPress) July 12, 2018
It says a lot that an England semi-final attracted more Irish viewers than a must-win Irish qualifier to get to the very tournament that England played that very semi-final in, but nevertheless, can the notable increase in viewers simply be attributed to a thirst to see the English team fail?
I mean outside of the whole 800 years, Oliver Cromwell, pinning Brexit delays on a lack of Irish co-operation, repeatedly butchering the pronunciation of the word Taoiseach, repeatedly claiming Katie Taylor as British, Ian Wright mocking Roy Keane’s accent, tearing up seats in Lansdowne Road, Martin Johnson and Mary McAleese and any of the other dozen or more examples that Irish people regularly use to justify wanting to see their sports teams falter on such a grand stage, there were simpler, more football-centric reasons that may have attracted people to this England team.
There was Martin Keown professing that England were playing the best football of the tournament after just 20 minutes in their tournament opener against Tunisia.
There was Gary Neville and Ian Wright talking about having the potential to go right to the semi-final after beating Panama, a team that scored just two goals and conceded 11 in three losses.
There was Gary Lineker staring down the World Cup to end a BBC broadcast like he was Frodo looking at the ring in Lord of the Rings.
There was Rio Ferdinand predicting that England would defeat Croatia by ‘at least two or three goals’ on the eve of their semi-final defeat. There was Alan Shearer and Ferdinand both slapping Jurgen Klinsman and telling him that this was indeed the year when football was coming home.
And how could they not get excited? They had one of the easiest paths to a final that we’ve ever seen for a major nation at a World Cup and yet you knew that it could never be that easy with England. Maybe it never will. Maybe they’re destined for bi-annual collapses from now until the end of football.
The #ItsComingHome movement and the giddiness of their supporters and pundits during the tournament stirred up a feeling within the empire that the pride and glory of international football had been restored for the Three Lions and that football could be used as this great source of unification at a time of increasing division.
“For five, ten, 15 years people have been saying ‘the international break is here, the Premier League has stopped’,” Gary Neville said on ITV’s post-match coverage of the Croatia defeat.
“That has been the attitude in our country. It has absolutely been the attitude and maybe this tournament has just given everyone just a little bit of a lift of how important the national team can be to the whole country.”
The confidence and the hubris of the English pundits, journalists and fans swelled with each passing round to create this tidal wave of support for the English team that really gave the #Itscominghome movement great legs when there was always the looming potential that one penalty, one shot or one Mario Mandzukic volley could instantly kill the campaign.
Baddiel, Skinner & Lightning Seeds’ It’s Coming Home was a rallying cry for the English and a sign to the other nations that England were going all in. That this was chips to the table time for Gareth Southgate’s side when he really had a four-of-a-kind in a hand when the straight flush was always in play.
When the cards dropped, the hands were played and the chips had been lost, Croatia midfielder Luka Modric was standing there just waiting to highlight how much the bullishness of their media had antagonised the Croats.
“People were talking … English journalists, pundits from television,” he told ITV after the game.
“They underestimated Croatia tonight and that was a huge mistake. All these words from them we take, we were reading and we were saying: ‘OK, today we will see who will be tired.’ They should be more humble and respect their opponents more.
“We showed again that we were not tired – we dominated the game mentally and physically.
“We should have killed the game even before extra time. This is an amazing achievement for us – it’s a dream come true after such a long time. We are in the final and that is the biggest success in Croatia history. We have to be proud.”
Pride comes before the fall and Croatia could be heading for quite the plunge against France in Sunday’s World Cup final but they disposed of an England team that were supposed to be unburdened by the weight of expectation heading into the tournament, and yet, had actually galvanised the opposition when that expectation took the form of an international movement that gained momentum with each passing day with everyone from Drake to Justin Timberlake looking for a seat on the bandwagon.
Why more Irish people watched this game than the last World Cup final, or last year’s All-Ireland hurling final is difficult to pin-point.
Maybe it’s simple Schadenfreude. Maybe it’s wanting to see England do well. Maybe it’s to see the drama of an England World Cup collapse or the surprise of an England victory. Whatever it was that compelled us to watch, we watched in greater numbers than almost any of us would have predicted and in greater numbers than any game from the last World Cup.
They may not have had a fantastic team in comparison to some of their previous iterations but it was still fantastic television, and when it comes to attracting viewers, that’s all that really matters.
