England may be out, but I’m just glad they got this far. Nobody would have had the Three Lions down as semi-finalists before the tournament, especially after they failed to get out of the group at the last World Cup and were knocked out by Iceland at the Euros.
It’s only the third time in our history that we’ve actually even reached the last four since winning it in 1966 and bowing out on penalties against West Germany in the semis in 1990.
We’ve supposedly had much better sides than this with a host of star names who have consistently failed to get past the quarters.
So for that, we should just be proud and congratulate Croatia on being the better team, but we’ll be back, and this is a great foundation to learn and build upon with a good coach and some good young players.
Add in to that the youngsters coming up who won last year’s Under-17 and Under-20 World Cups who will start to filter through to the senior team, and the future finally starts to look bright.
Knowing that just 33 per cent of the English Premier League’s players are actually English also makes this run all the more amazing.
It’s not coming home this time, but perhaps in a way ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is, is coming home after all. If ‘it’ is having belief in our much-maligned national team again, then perhaps that is the biggest thing we could have won this time around.
Let’s be honest, we were very lucky just to get this far, the draw fell very favourably for us and we finally managed to win a penalty shoot-out (against Colombia in the Last 16).
There will be those who say we missed the biggest chance in our lifetime to finally get it done, but in reality we were never going to beat France in the final, and against Croatia we just couldn’t back it up and got rightfully found out by a better side on the night.
None of these young England players have actually won anything (or at least won a great deal) at club level — so why were we suddenly expecting them to do the unthinkable? It was naive at best.
Until we have seasoned and experienced players in their 30s playing at top clubs like Real Madrid’s Luka Modric, Juventus’ Mario Mandzukic and Barcelona’s Ivan Rakitic — or at least a bit of world-renowned stardust like Paris Saint Germain’s Kylian Mbappe, then we can but dare to dream with the likes of Tom, Dick and Harry on our side.
You can’t win something before its won. And you can’t expect all the rewards without putting in all the years of hard work. It will come. Fifty-two years and still counting.
