Faulty reasoning signals

• Biased Writer Voice - 69.6%
• Negativity Bias - 37.2%
• Hasty Generalization - 23.9%

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I was standing (alright, swaying) in the garden of my local pub after 4am on Monday, as the first light of day appeared in north-east London and the final whistle finally blew in Mexico City. Bliss it was in that dawn to be awake, as Wordsworth would surely have said.

Not for the first time, England’s 3-2 victory over Mexico did feel like a new football dawn. Even if that dawn turns out to be yet another false one, at least we have already enjoyed more light in this World Cup than during the dark ages under Gareth Southgate.

Two years ago, when the European Championships coincided with the UK General Election, I wrote an article on spiked entitled ‘ Gareth Southgate is the Keir Starmer of football ’. Like the Labour leader in the election campaign, I suggested, the England coach approached the Euros as ‘a risk-averse, safety-first bore, obsessed with not losing at all costs, who believes being daring is too dangerous and probably equates “flair” with a distress signal’.

The difference was, I pointed out, that Southgate’s England would have to face tougher opponents than the pathetic Tory Party. So ‘whatever his obvious shortcomings’, cautious Starmer would end the election in Downing Street. By contrast, cautious Southgate looked like ‘ending the Euros with nothing – except that this darling of the establishment will probably still get a knighthood’. And lo, it came to pass as Mystic Mick foretold…

Thankfully, Thomas Tuchel, the German who replaced ‘Keir’ Southgate as England boss, is not the Andy Burnham of football. If he were, his team would likely be the same but even worse than his predecessor’s.

True, there were still traces of unimaginative English football in the games against Ghana and Panama. But in the last-16 match against Mexico, we watched an England team we have waited years to see playing away in a major tournament. A team that was defending for their lives yet also going for the kill, with a manager who was not praying for a penalty shoot-out.

The result was a triumph against the odds – over the altitude, the crowd, the VAR-imposed red card and penalty, and England’s own self-destruct gene. Where Southgate’s England turned into a damp squib in successive tournaments, most infamously versus Italy at Wembley in Euro 2020, this England came through a footballing ordeal of fire in Mexico’s Azteca cauldron. And they won it with 10 men.

On Monday morning, that did feel like a new dawn for those of us old enough to remember a long line of over-hyped England teams failing at the first serious hurdle on foreign soil: versus Argentina in 1986 and 1998, Brazil in 2002, Portugal in 2006 and France in 2022. The England fans over there have, for some reason, adopted Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’ as an anthem this time around, which at least makes a change from repeatedly having to look back in anger.

Although Tuchel does seem to have picked up the English habit of getting his excuses in early, such as blaming the Mexican weather before kick-off, our adopted ‘Tommy Tucker’ is already easily the humiliated Germany’s most significant contribution to this World Cup. (What the Germans call Schadenfreude – taking pleasure in the misfortune of others – is a proper football tradition, whatever the Nu Socca nerds might claim.)

Tuchel got considerable stick when he admitted he had not necessarily picked the best players for his squad, but rather those that would fit his team plan. He shares that utilitarian attitude with the legendary England manager Sir Alf Ramsey. Ramsey of course silenced his critics by winning the World Cup for the first and only time in our history in 1966. We hard-bitten football cynics still seriously doubt whether Tuchel will do the same, but…

So, how far can England go now? We have two genuinely world-class players. Captain Harry Kane seems a better goal-scorer than ever; Jude Bellingham is an unstoppable monster when he feels in the mood. Between them, they have scored 10 of England’s 11 goals in the tournament to date.

At the other end, England’s problems in defence have been much-discussed. It is not just the lack of right-backs in the squad, but of leaders. Jordan Pickford in goal did rise to the crosses and the occasion versus Mexico – let’s hope he continues to command.

I backed England to win in Mexico, and I do think we should beat Norway, if only our Premier League defenders can hobble the super-monstrous Erling Haaland of Manchester City, a striker for the ages who has scored 62 goals in 54 games for Norway. Then it could well be a semi-final showdown with Lionel Messi’s Argentina, the stuff that football dreams and nightmares are made of, with the flashy favourites France waiting in the final.

We live in faint hope, knowing full well that it’s the hope that kills you. But anyway, whatever happens between now and a week on Sunday, we have already had a joyous World Cup.

Not because it has had those who know nothing about football screeching in the pubs, nor because, as those snobbish media pundits claim, it has briefly united our diverse communities divided by politics, blah blah. But because it has given us football fans some old-fashioned, one-eyed patriotic pride.

England will never be loved like the ‘cuddly’ Tartan Army or the rowing Vikings of Norway. Our players will never be crowned as international treasures like Messi, who the FIFA suits seem determined to see lift the World Cup in his last tournament. (Let’s hope we can reduce him to Ronaldo-style retirement tears next week.) But if nobody likes us, we genuinely don’t care.

Saturday night, 10pm. To update Shakespeare’s Henry V : Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Cry Jude for England, Harry, and St George!

Mick Hume is a spiked columnist.

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