As has been reasonably well established, no England senior men’s team have won a major trophy for, well, a few years. With that in mind, here’s a helpful guide for England to the art of “coming home”: why other national teams have actually managed to get it over the line and something to be learned from those others who have not.
How to win a big final
Playing without fear
Cricket World Cup final, 2019: England beat New Zealand after a Super Over
Who needs form? Certainly not this team and it is striking how similar the direction of the journey that Eoin Morgan’s team took was to the path on which Harry Kane et al find themselves on.
Morgan’s England started this campaign with no form. Recognise that? They slumped so badly initially that they had to beat India and then New Zealand to qualify for the semi-finals. We couldn’t even “bring ’em home” because they were already home. It was the gathering weight of it all, partly because it was on home soil. At one point, Ben Stokes told a team meeting: “I am nervous, I am anxious, I am worried about what happens if we don’t win.” Yet that proved to be the pivotal moment, it demanded a complete reset which was then achieved largely with the work that followed with the team psychologist.
Here is another familiar aspect: high-level criticism from outside, in particular, the former England captain Michael Vaughan, playing the Gary Lineker role, bagging Jonny Bairstow. Bairstow then responded by hitting successive centuries.
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By the final, Morgan’s team had managed to free themselves up so much so that before Jofra Archer’s Super Over, Joss Butler said to Morgan that he hoped he had shamrocks in his pockets and Adil Rashid chipped in saying “Don’t worry because Allah’s with us” and they all laughed. This is key.
We know what Kane’s England look like when they aren’t free, when they are subsumed by nerves and fear. Can they get to the same point as Morgan’s team — where they can enjoy it? Where it becomes about the experience rather than the outcome?
Squad feels valued
Olympic women’s hockey final, 2016. Netherlands 3 Great Britain 3; GB win 2-0 on pens
Team GB were underdogs for this final — like England are on Sunday. Also like England, they were facing technically excellent opposition and they knew that they would have to spend a lot of time without the ball; ditto again.
There are pleasing similarities in the head coaches too, here, which augurs well, both of them smart and emotionally intelligent. Danny Kerry was on his third Olympics; this is Gareth Southgate’s fourth major tournament campaign. You learn along the way, at least Kerry did, and what he had mastered by the time the Rio Games came around was the importance of the team environment.
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This is also where Southgate is strong. What are you going to allow your team to be festering over in these last 48 hours? How tight are you as a group? Is the whole squad moving as one? Does everyone feel they have value?
I regard Kerry’s team as the ultimate “environment” team, but I also expect the environment and psychological preparation of Southgate’s team to have been excellent.
Oh, and the hockey team were dead confident that if they pushed the Dutch to penalties, they would prevail — which is exactly what happened. I expect England to be in the same headspace there too.
Patience to ride out bad spells
Rugby World Cup final, 2003: Australia 17 England 20 (aet)
Often lost in those sepia-tinted Sydney memories is quite how average England were in the second half. They led 14-5 at half-time and, though they weren’t helped by some very peculiar refereeing, they lost the second half 9-0 which triggered 20 minutes of extra time.
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You can be intimidated by the direction in which a game is going, or you can have the frame of mind that England had here. When the players recall that period, they will tell you, to a man, that they never thought they were going to lose. They just saw it as their challenge to ride out the Australian comeback.
Between the final whistle of normal time and the first period of extra time, Sir Clive Woodward rushed down to the players on the side of the pitch to share with them his pearls of wisdom. What he found, though, was a group of players analysing and appraising and agreeing on what needed to be done. They were so focused that Woodward decided to say nothing.
• Owen Slot: What happened to England’s 2003 World Cup heroes?
This is a real lesson to England in the final on Sunday because there will be periods when it feels as though the game is going away from them. Do they have the same patience to ride that out? Or do they succumb to the pressure and make rash decisions?
Yes, a final is a test of nerves and self-belief. The way that England have survived here in Germany does suggest they know how to navigate that too.
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Emphasis on finishers
Women’s European Championship final, 2022: England 2 Germany 1
In a way, Sarina Wiegman’s Lionesses have nothing to do with Southgate’s England. The distinction is that when the Lionesses won their semi-final, they had broken new ground, they had got England further than they had ever been before and thus, with the burden of pressure then lifting, they were able to float on a delicious momentum into the final. They had already charmed their nation whether they won or not.
Southgate’s England, however, still bear the weight — specifically of their Euros final defeat last time around, but there’s always history and all those bloody years of hurt in the mind, England’s inability to win a trophy and all that. This is definitely not a “nothing to lose” game.
Yet we can draw something from their twinned experience. The Lionesses’ two goals came from substitutes, the winner arriving with Ollie Watkins-esque timing. This emphasis on the finishers served Wiegman, the Lionesses manager, well and, here in Germany, it has kept Southgate alive too.
… and how finals are lost
No emotional reset
Rugby World Cup final, 2019: South Africa 32 England 12
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England’s 19-7 victory over the All Blacks in the semi-final was widely considered one of the best, if not the very best, England rugby performance ever. The squad certainly reacted in that way. The jubilance of the changing-room scenes afterwards is part of the story and it wasn’t just the players celebrating as though they had just won the World Cup, it was the staff, too, some of whom were in tears.
It wasn’t vastly different to England smashing Australia in the semi-final of the 2019 cricket World Cup — except when the coach Trevor Bayliss clocked the tenor of these celebrations, he quickly injected the necessary dose of reality: wind your heads in lads, you’ve won nothing yet.
With Eddie Jones’s rugby team in 2019, however, that never happened. Some of the coaches argued that the players needed to come down from the high before building back up again for the final, however, Jones never allowed that emotional reset to happen. Nevertheless, everyone still expected them to win the final. Probably the players too. They lost 32-12. There is an obvious lesson here. My guess is that Southgate is smart enough to know it already.
Sitting back on a lead
Men’s European Championship final, 2021: Italy 1 England 1; Italy win 3-2 on pens
We know too well what this looks like because it’s been the spectre of the past month: England go ahead, they don’t push for a second and instead they start sitting back, they become increasingly defensive and invite the opposition onto them. It’s tempting to say that this is no longer in the DNA, but it is, isn’t it?
• Declan Rice: England can’t sit back against Spain in Euros final
Sometimes the best team just wins
Women’s World Cup final, 2023: Spain 1 England 0
Though it’s neat to derive a lesson — or takeaways as we now call them — from every disappointment, there are times, like this, when the better team does just finish ahead of the not-quite-so-good team. Southgate sent the Lionesses a video message before the final saying “there’s no advice [to give] because you’ve done more than us already” and, even now, it is hard to pinpoint advice that might have helped. It is tempting to pick over history and say that coach Sarina Weigman got her team selection wrong and should have picked Lauren James from the start (she came on at half-time), but that is only a hypothetical.
• Molly Hudson: What can England learn from Lionesses’ World Cup heartbreak?
A tempting parallel to be drawn here is with the Spanish opposition. The Spanish team who beat the Lionesses were notably technically superior; the Spanish players awaiting England in Berlin are technically superior too. Except they aren’t, are they?
We know how good this Spain are. We still don’t know how good this England could be. They have more growth in them than Spain. That’s a happy theory, anyway. They just haven’t got long to grow.
Spain v England
European Championships final, Olympiastadion Berlin
Sunday, kick-off 8pm
TV BBC 1/ITV
