This time, there would be no Andrea Pirlo masterclass. Thomas Müller and Mesut Özil did not cut England to ribbons. Nobody got a red card. No classic shootout malaise. There was not an Icelandic player in sight at Al Bayt Stadium on Saturday night, unless one of them had somehow managed to buy a ticket. No familiar second-half regression, no midfield collapse.
In short, there are no easy targets here, no effigies to burn. The common consensus, indeed, is that England played well. Which is nice. It’s lovely that England played well. England have been playing well for a few years now. And yet the result was the same that Roy Hodgson’s side achieved in 2012, the same as three Sven-Göran Eriksson sides, the same as Diego Maradona’s Argentina in 2010 and Germany in 1994. Which leads to a pointed and open-ended question: does any of the above really matter?
