Up against Norway’s heart and skill and Florida’s heat, talisman got England through – but there is much to fix
Jude against the sun. For much of this game there was a feeling of three separate entities struggling to assert their will in the heavy air of Miami Gardens. First, Norway, in their first World Cup quarter-final, who played with heart, skill and patience, and were by any Jude-free metric probably the better team.
Alongside this, forcing itself centre stage, was the July Florida heat, the kind of air that congeals around you like an invisible white sauce, that makes your vision blur and your brain sag, and to which England seemed uniquely vulnerable.
For long periods here they looked not just ragged or confused, but utterly done, hanging there like a set of desiccated white shirts on a swampland laundry line.
Humans aren’t really supposed to be down here. Miami is basically a swamp in disguise, a city that appears to exist balanced on a thin film of traffic, tarmac and deep-fried grouper crumb. Across from Miami Stadium there’s a sculpted shopping-centre pond where giant lizards the size of greyhounds skitter back into the mulch as you walk past and turn to look at you, not hostile, just puzzled: a look that says: “What are you doing here, seriously? You have seen this place?”
Florida’s residents are engaged in a constant battle with “corrosion”, the term for what the air does to every surface, a constant assault of spores damp, warping. Well, the corrosion got England here. They were, to their credit, strong at the end, and steely at the start. But in between they were poor for long periods, guileless and awkward, too many players melting in the glare of the occasion.
At times this felt like the familiar England parade of we are the hollow men, stuffed men, waiting for the game to happen to them, football as a slow suffocation in that thick sweet air. But they also had Jude Bellingham, who seems increasingly to exist as an entirely different category of human in this team, out there playing a parallel tournament, one that has to this point swept the rest of them along in its wake.
From early on it was clear Bellingham’s task here was once again to assert himself not just against the opposition, or even the entropy of his own team, but to emerge as the main character in that three-sided battle against the elements, a man out there single-handedly battling the air, frame-mogging the sun.
By the end he had scored both goals in England’s 2-1 win over 120 minutes, both of them full body sliding finishes. In between he just refused to lose, transmitting surges of energy and purpose to his wilting teammates.
Both Bellingham goals came when Norway seemed to be running the game and England losing it. Most obviously there was the moment at 1-0 down, with half-time looming, and England having squandered a long period of passive dominance, a team being beaten by the air.
The equalising goal was England’s first shot. It came from the diagonal run Bellingham makes from right to left, the ball fizzed in via Elliot Anderson, Norway seeming to wait, a kind of aura bubble opening up around that lone white shirt, with time for Bellingham to take another step and shoot with surprising power across Ørjan Håskjold Nyland and into the far corner.
On his bench Ståle Solbakken erupted in an uncharacteristic fit of fury. At times it has felt at this World Cup like that Bellingham run is the one thing England have to break the day open, their only free element in a game of squares and right angles. Norway’s coaches will have spent long hours analysing it, replaying it on the big screen. Everyone has a plan until they get Bellinghamed.
England’s No 10 has six goals at this World Cup, and has been the dominant force in a team that continue to fall apart a little on the hoof. He remains the only England player confident and skilful enough to beat a player, to make the game up in front of him, to take well-judged chances with his angles and passing.
It would be wrong to make the kind of comparisons that will be thrown up, the El Diego one-man World Cup run, the sun king, the sword of sporting destiny and all the rest. This doesn’t happen in teams this flawed. England were rescued here, not fixed.
Up to this point the right-back position has been the Spın̈al Tap drummer’s stool, its occupants constantly perishing along the way. Here it was Bellingham’s space, the central midfield, that collapsed in real time. He seemed to feel it coming too, sprinting back to the centre circle after scoring that goal, then haring off the pitch ahead of his teammates at half-time, a man simply feeling the need to run, to part the air.
Miami Stadium is the home of the NFL’s Dolphins, a large craning hanger with a tubular flying roof. At 5pm on a high summer Florida afternoon it was a vast open sweating box of air and noise. Everything was red and white at kick-off, the stands decked with the usual whistle-stop tour of the nation, Grimsby to Portsmouth to Bury, like a John Betjeman poem about the sad-sweet decline of the English market town.
England began with a period of slow control, followed by a steady wilting. There were bright points, some nice little turns and glides from Bellingham, and space on the flanks, but no precision from Noni Madueke in particular. What you saw in that period was England’s failings, a lack of craft, an inability to break through a tightly packed double bolt.
The drinks break arrived with 71% possession for England, three times as many passes and zero shots. And on 35 minutes Norway took the lead, deservedly so on the momentum in the game. The ball was worked out to Andreas Schjelderup on the left, whose mis-hit cross became a sublime dipping top corner ping. It was also misjudged by Jordan Pickford, who seemed to think it was flying wide.
Otherwise for England this was the day the midfield died, that central axle clanking along the highway for the last hour of the game, sparks flying. Anderson was also magnificent here, as he had to be, running and challenging for everything, filling double spaces everywhere. By the end Anderson had basically run himself to a husk, just bone and paper and dry ship’s biscuits inside a white shirt, a man who will now be passing sand and gravel for the next two days.
Across those 120 minutes the central midfield duo went from Declan Rice and Anderson to Bellingham and Anderson, to Reece James and Anderson, to Morgan Rogers and Anderson. Not Kobbie Mainoo, notably, who is presumably behind David Beckham, a cone, a giant lizard and the TV camera cable in the running for a spot. Why is Mainoo here? Why is Adam Wharton not here? These are questions deserving of a genuine answer.
Thomas Tuchel was present in his classic black shirt, black silky slacks, white trainers, like an undertaker at the beach. But at times you wondered if the heat was getting to his brain too, out there whirring and whizzing like an overburdened air conditioning unit. His key mistake here was to move Bellingham into central midfield when Declan Rice came off feeling ill at half-time. Bellingham was main-charactering the game at that point.
Suddenly the energy switched. England were wide open at times. Norway kept the ball and moved it more slickly than England in their own strong period, exposing the poverty of England’s movement and basic craft on the ball.
Tuchel did fix this in the end. His final midfield roll of the dice was to bring in Rogers, a move that coincided with regained control as Norway also tired and Erling Haaland trudged off. It was Rogers’ shot that created the winning goal, Bellingham again the only moving figure in the middle of all that thick, heavy air as Nyland spilt the ball into his path.
And so England held on. Bellingham came off with 110 minutes gone to a booming ovation, replaced by the closer Dan Burn, rumbling out like several very small men on each other’s shoulders inside an overcoat, and slotting into a reassuringly secure back five.
England will now travel to Atlanta and a semi-final. It is a fine achievement, not least when they have so much to fix, with that sense of a team that have got there on vibes, rage and moments of self-contained brilliance from the man in the No 10 shirt out there playing his own glorious parallel World Cup.
Bellingham is not going to win this for England on his own. France and Spain have really good players too, but in a functional team structure. But this can wait. Norway, Miami, and a quarter-final where even the air seemed to be pulling them down by the ankles can stand as its own day in the sun.
