Ivory Coast lost their second group game at this year’s Africa Cup of Nations and followed it up by losing their third, 4-0 to Equatorial Guinea. They were, by any realistic assessment, on their way out of a tournament they were hosting, especially when Ghana went 2-0 up against Mozambique, which seemed to close off the possibility of the Ivorians going through as one of the four best third-place teams.
But then Mozambique scored twice in injury-time, Ivory Coast snuck through, sacked their manager and, after equalising with an 86th-minute penalty against Senegal, and equalising in the last minute when down to 10 men against Mali, the rest was history.
Ivory Coast ended up winning the semi-final and the final easily enough. By the end of the tournament they looked like the best team in it. Earlier,they had been described as revenants, the team that stubbornly refused to die against all expectation. They seemed to have drawn strength from the sense of their inexplicable indestructibility.
Which is to say tournaments don’t always make much sense and the team that wins them may not have looked the best team at the start, may not be the best team at all.
Spain have been by far the best side at Euro 2024, which otherwise has been smaller nations playing open and entertaining football and the giants grinding and clanking along. In part, that is probably the impact of the accumulated fatigue of the expanded fixture list allied to the disruption caused by Covid and the winter World Cup in Qatar. This has meant football being played essentially non-stop since lockdown came to an end.
But in part it’s the result of the belief that risk-free football is the way to win tournaments. Don’t concede and you can’t lose. Keep it tight and rely on attacking talent to produce something.
Gareth Southgate has never hidden that he sees Portugal in 2016 and France in 2018 as the models and his faith in that way of doing things has helped him resist the daft talk of releasing the handbrake (beauty is achieved through balance, not through packing the team with creative players; it doesn’t matter how many forwards you have on the field if you cannot win the ball to give it to them, if they have no space in which to move).
There is a paradox here. Football lives in the collective consciousness through moments of shared emotion and the most memorable moments France experienced in 2018 came when their system broke down and Argentina somehow went 2-1 up against them in the last 16. Benjamin Pavard’s sliced shot into the top corner and Kylian Mbappé’s double endure far more vividly than the subsequent workaday wins over Uruguay and Belgium.
Portugal managed to win Euro 2016 while doing nothing of note; there’s never been a tournament win that has produced so little for the post-final montage. What did they rerun on Portuguese TV during lockdown? Which moments do they turn to when they need some patriotic sentimentality in which to wallow?
It is the grit that creates the pearl and England already have three from this tournament. Whatever happens on Sunday, Jude Bellingham’s overhead kick, Bukayo Saka’s relieved smile and Ollie Watkins’s turn and finish will take their place in the pantheon alongside Geoff Hurst’s third in 1966, David Platt’s volley in 1990 and Teddy Sheringham’s layoff in 1996.
You could make a case for Jordan Pickford’s penalty save against Colombia but none of Southgate’s previous three tournaments have produced anything close. At which, the temptation is to drift into the sentimental wish-fulfilment of it’s-meant-to-be, which means nothing until people start to believe it.
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Adding to that is the way such a range of players have provided key moments. Although five of England’s goals have been scored by Kane and Bellingham, their contributions beyond that have been limited. Instead, it’s been the passing of Kobbie Mainoo, the penalties of Trent Alexander-Arnold and Ivan Toney, the scampering of Saka and, being polite, the presence of Pickford, even before Watkins’s winner, that have led England to this point.
What if this is like Ivory Coast? What if England had to experience the low of the performance against Denmark to undergo the reset that has led to the final? What if this was how it was always meant to be, Southgate the accidental hero abandoning his blueprints (while still benefiting from in-depth penalty preparation) to finally emulate Sir Alf in his (probable) final tournament? What if the perception of destiny is enough?
The reality is that Spain, on form, are overwhelming favourites for the final. They have the tournament’s two most impressive attacking players in Yamine Lamal and Nico Williams. They have Rodri, who never loses. They have Dani Carvajal, a gnarled serial winner.
More than anything, they have a system and a style that has produced by far the most fluent football. If they beat England, they will become the only side other than Brazil, in 2002, to have won seven games out of seven at a major tournament.
Against that, England have some brilliant individuals, the sense of a pattern of play beginning to emerge and, having gone behind in three knockout games, perhaps something akin to that sense Ivory Coast felt in February that they can’t be beaten.