England, after toying with disaster, reaches for the prize

DORTMUND, Germany — The sensation was unfamiliar. It came on suddenly, breaking over everyone at once. Ollie Watkins, with tears in his eyes. England’s players, and substitutes, and staff, rushing onto the field. England’s fans, spilling over one another in their delirium in their stands. The sensation is called joy, and it has been conspicuous by its absence for Gareth Southgate’s team for the past month.

Instead, England has spent its time at Euro 2024 in Germany wandering miserably through a miasma of rising self-doubt, prickling frustration and bubbling anger. Somehow, it now finds itself en route to Berlin, to a second European Championship final in succession, to the country’s first major final on foreign soil.

And it is doing so with no little pep, Southgate’s team having rather conveniently saved its best performance of Euro 2024 for the business end of the tournament. True, it required Watkins’ last-minute intervention to seal its date with Spain in the final Sunday, but this was a display rich first in panache and then persistence to see off an obdurate Netherlands side, 2-1.

Maybe this was Southgate’s plan all along. He is, by inclination, a details coach, a fine-margins manager, a winning-culture guy. He has spent eight years as England manager leaving no stone unturned. He has introduced, in this tournament alone, breathing coaches, sleep-tracking rings, the pop stylings of Ed Sheeran.

But perhaps, behind the scenes, he identified another possible edge: Maybe what England had been lacking all this time, in its half-century and more of hurt since it won the 1966 World Cup, was to approach a tournament by assuming that everything was going to fall apart at every moment. If it indulged in wild and contradictory mood swings, created a sustained impression of dysfunction, maybe it would find its way.

Certainly, ever since the country’s final tuneup game before the tournament — an insipid defeat against Iceland — England has treated Euro 2024 as the perfect opportunity for a full-scale national psychodrama.

Externally, it may have looked as if England was grinding through its opponents with more efficiency than style, lifting itself to meet stiffer challenges, developing a particularly useful habit of staging daring, last-minute escapes from messes largely of its own making. Internally, though, to the country as a whole, each game has brought nothing but misery.

Southgate has, at various times, been told that Trent Alexander-Arnold was the problem, and that Trent Alexander-Arnold was the solution. Should he drop Phil Foden? No, don’t do that. But definitely find a way to play Cole Palmer and Anthony Gordon. Maybe Bukayo Saka could go from right wing to left back?

Jude Bellingham, the country’s new darling, was untouchable, right up until the point that he wasn’t, and actually maybe he was overrated, and just a little bit too full of himself. Harry Kane? The captain and England’s record goal-scorer, rated by no less an authority than Wayne Rooney as possibly the finest player the country has ever produced? Drop him too. Or maybe it would just be easier if Southgate had the common decency to be fired.

The manager has, in truth, not helped himself. The squad he named for this tournament felt, right from the start, like a break from tradition. Southgate has never been a populist. That has always been his great strength, his ability to resist oscillating opinions drifting in from outside, his unwavering belief in the system that he knew worked, that had brought England to a semifinal at the 2018 World Cup and within a penalty shootout of winning the European Championship in 2021.

This time, though, the resources at his disposal were just too good to resist. In came Palmer, and Kobbie Mainoo, and Gordon, much to the delight of a fan base longing to see a more expansive style. The problem was that Southgate did not seem — does not seem, to an extent — entirely sure what to do with them.

If anything, the story of England’s tournament has been one of a team slowly reverting to what it knows. Southgate does not want England to be too freewheeling, too adventurous, too thrilling. That brings with it risk, and Southgate’s abiding belief is to mitigate risk. Southgate is bright, erudite and thoughtful, but he is cautious by both inclination and belief, and he does not have much truck with cavaliers.

The problem, of course, is that this is at odds with what his public wants. The days when Southgate was the country’s waistcoated dad are long gone. England has been chafing for some time at finding itself under the heel of a mild-mannered technocrat. It wants blood, and it wants thunder, or at the very least it wants some forward runs.

And yet, once again, here is Southgate, at the door of another major final. His reign has, in many ways, been ideal for soccer’s hot-take era. He is the most successful manager England has had since Alf Ramsey, the man who won the World Cup. He has also developed a useful trick of only ever playing Slovakia in knockout games.

Both of these things are true: He is both fully deserving of the knighthood he will reportedly be given for his success — that is how wildly England has oscillated in the last few weeks, that his dueling fates are either unceremonious dismissal or being honored by a king — and reliant to an undeniable degree on what looks an awful lot like the luck of the draw.

It is that endless, irresolvable debate, more than anything, that has made this tournament feel so draining for England: the sense that nothing is wholly true, that everything is contestable, that whole worlds stand or fall with every performance. England has a second major final in both three years and 58 years and yet, until the very last minutes Wednesday night, it did not seem to have made anyone involved especially happy.

Perhaps that will change now, with the possibility of glory so close. Or perhaps not. That is the problem with results soccer: It depends, entirely, on results.

Win on Sunday, and everything that has happened this month will drift into the wind. In England’s case, the destination is significantly more important than the journey. Fail, though, and all that is left is the sense that it did not, really, make you as happy as you thought.

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