England fans please calm down! You’re getting ahead of yourselves again.
Before the tournament, there were zero expectations and we didn’t even release an official World Cup song.
But now, after having only beaten Tunisia and Panama, we are already plotting our path to the final after supposedly orchestrating a tactical defeat to Belgium, in order to get the “easier” half of the draw.
Let’s keep a lid on it. Big teams may be dropping like flies but there is no such thing as an easy game, and you can’t seriously gauge how good we are from two wins over minnows, and an edged defeat involving two second string sides.
We haven’t even played a big team in anger yet and the knockouts will be completely different to the group.
We always do this. Granted this year it may be slightly delayed but the football fever has been cranked up again to intolerable levels, despite us promising ourselves we wouldn’t get too excited this time around. We know pride comes before a fall, and we are perhaps the nation who have been made most aware of that fact, but we continue to fall for it.
Although we’ve never lost to Colombia in a total five meetings (three wins and two draws — the biggest being a 2-0 group stage win over them at World Cup 1998) we’ve also never played them in their current pomp with the likes of James Rodriguez and Radamel Falcao.
Rodriguez may not be 100 per cent fit, but even at his worst he’s still a game changer. The positive thing is that we are scoring — Harry Kane is on fire — and we have had an extra day to prepare and less distance to travel, our star men are also rested, having not played against Belgium. But, the negative is that we are coming off a loss (be it intentional or not) and haven’t managed to keep a clean sheet yet. On top of this, we are being made to wait as the last second round tie, and the suspense is killing us.
To be mentally brushing Colombia aside and already plotting potential quarters against Sweden or semis against Croatia is highly presumptuous, believe me even I’ve dared to glance (perhaps longer than a glance) at the permutations but it’s not on.
Yes, I agree, this is our best chance since 1966 to retrace our steps back to the final, but that’s not to say Colombia, Sweden or Croatia (if they even are the opponents) will be walk overs — anything but. And knowing our luck, we’ve ducked the hard part of the group where we could have made the quarters with a win over Japan only to go out in the Last 16 to Colombia.
I hope the players aren’t staring at wallcharts with the same level of presumptuousness, and I also hope that we don’t forget what we came into this tournament hoping to achieve. It wasn’t to win or even reach the latter stages but rather to just restore some damaged pride and give a good account of ourselves, anything else is a bonus. With a bit of humility we may go far, but also don’t be too upset if it all ends tomorrow, because as yet we haven’t proved anything.
