[excerpts of article from The Telegraph -- typically very critical]
We came to see England attempt to secure what would be the greatest win in their World Cup history outside their own island. This was it: the finest World Cup performance since 1966, and yet by the end it felt even bigger than that. An epic of which we shall talk about for years, a brilliant, resolute, flawed, 108 minutes in total of all the best of this thing we call English football.
First, that unbeaten Azteca Stadium record for Mexico in 26 competitive games going back to 2013: it’s over. It ended with the poor soul in the stadium address system having to press play on Three Lions at the final whistle and just short of 78,000 Mexicans forced to listen to “football’s coming home” and all that. It was not supposed to end like this for Mexico, but their World Cup is over. England face Norway in Miami on Saturday in a World Cup quarter-final.
They go with a lighter load than the burden shouldered by England teams of the past. For the first time in 40 years, the Azteca for England is no longer about Diego Maradona’s handball goal and then his great, humiliating second. Now, it is about this frankly absurd game which ended with England hurtling forward into the last eight of the World Cup, having turned up at 7,350 feet with no high-altitude preparation whatsoever.
Throughout it all you had to remember that England were playing at high altitude, against a team who last lost a World Cup game in Mexico in 1970 in Toluca. In three home tournaments, Mexico have never lost at the Azteca, until now. They are not a giant of the game on the basis of their players’ pedigree, but here in this stadium they are much more than the sum of their parts.
Their lungs burning and their muscles aching, the 11 men of England, and then the 10 men of England, beat a fervent football nation on its own patch.
This was a great performance. This was not the fanatical full-press commitment of the Mexico team who tore through Ecuador in the previous round. They stood off England, and the game took on a different form, but Mexico were always dangerous. They had passed through the first England press, so Tuchel adapted. England let the centre-back César Montes have the ball and trusted that he was the least dangerous passers of Mexico’s centre-halves.
They saw it home. Yes, there were moments of jeopardy but, as the 11 minutes of time added on slowly expired, it gradually dawned that this time it would not be England fouling it up. Sadly, for the great Mexican football nation – it would be them again, hustled out of their tournament.
In the England celebrations that followed, Henderson failed to jump cleanly over an advertising board and landed badly – his wrist potentially broken. A surreal moment as he was carried off on a stretcher, his England team-mates caught somewhere between joy and concern. How had this happened? The last eight of the World Cup. Germany, the Netherlands and now Brazil all out.
It felt like the thin air had finally altered all perceptions of reality, but here it was, plain to see, the best we have of England at the World Cup since 1966. That is a summer only a few alive can still remember, but still tolls down the years as a reminder of the possible. That World Cup, for Sir Alf Ramsey’s team, was all played at Wembley, while this occasion was 5,550 miles away from north-west London in a stadium where, generally, teams come to lose. But not England. Not this time.