This must surely go down as the least convincing run to the final of a European Championship since, well, England did it last year.
It very probably ends the same way, very probably against Spain as well, but never mind that for now.
Another night, another ridiculous Lionesses game. Imagine being one of the people who deliberately avoids watching this glorious nonsense chaos because it’s got girls in it.
With 95 minutes on the clock in normal time, England trailed. With 118 minutes on the clock in regular time, they were level.
But this is an England team that finds a way. Via a dramatic late equaliser in normal time and winner from a penalty rebound in the final knockings of extra-time, they defeated Italy 2-1 and will have a shot at defending their title. It’s a chance that time and again has looked to be slipping away over the last couple of weeks.
For more than 80 minutes, England really were alarmingly poor. And not for the first time in recent weeks. The attacking play was curiously ponderous, promising moments and passages of play too often breaking down with Lauren James wanting an extra touch or Lauren Hemp not quite picking the right option.
At the other end, a rejigged England defence still remained disconcertingly vulnerable to any simple long ball over the top into the acres of space that exist between that defence and England’s often startlingly understaffed midfield.
An Italy side England had beaten 5-1 last year settled into the game as the first half progressed and by the time they took the lead were decent value for it. Again, England’s defending at every stage of it left much to be desired.
Just about every England defender will think about their contribution to it and wonder whether they could have done something differently as Italy made their down England’s left all too easily with defenders pulled out of position all over the place. Only Hannah Hampton could really be spared blame entirely, Barbara Bonansea’s rasping close-range strike flashing past her before she could react.
England’s response was… not great. The second half drifted past in a haze of rushed England decisions on the pitch and inexplicably delayed ones from the sideline.
While England resorted to desperation injury-time-ball with a good half-hour to go, Sarina Wiegman was content to stick with the same XI that started the half – Beth Mead having replaced James at the break – until the 78th minute when Chloe Kelly replaced Georgia Stanway.
It was another seven agonisingly ineffective minutes before Wiegman played her joker. The Hail Mary. On came Michelle Agyemang and Aggie Beever-Jones, off went Alessia Russo and in the clearest indication of the desperation now at play, Leah Williamson.
And somehow it worked again. There’s a desperately fine line between substitutions that come just in time, and too late. We really should all have learned by now to trust that Wiegman knows where that line stands.
But this was cutting it fine. There were elements of fortune about Agyemang’s equaliser, but when the same things keep happening to the same people sometimes you have to accept there’s something else at play.
Some players simply come alive in those moments. Agyemang is already one such player. Kelly is unquestionably another.
When the ball broke to Agyemang in a crowded Italy penalty area as the clock ticked over to the last of seven added minutes, you just knew. Even when the first touch was less than perfect, there still seemed no other possible outcome. One unerring double-nutmeg finish later, England had their salvation.
There are world-class players who wait their entire careers and never get a moment like this. Agyemang is 19 years old and has had two of them this week.
Somehow, England had got out of jail again. And once again the teenager had sprung them.
Did England deserve to score an equaliser? Probably not. Did Italy deserve to concede one? Maybe. There were definitely some dark arts going on with the time-wasting as the second half ticked by. And you’d have to have a heart of stone not to have enjoyed the contrast between Italy’s bench celebrating gleefully when a Kelly corner was scuffed straight into the side netting and Italy’s bench about 90 seconds later after Agyemang had changed everything.
Extra-time was a fascinating 30 minutes. As well as the usual influence of exhaustion – both in mind and body – this extra-time had the additional and always fun element of featuring one team who knew they were seconds away from history and another who had been forced into such dramatic and desperate late gambles that they no longer resembled a recognisable football team at all.
England had attacking options everywhere you looked, including Hemp operating as a kind of quasi-left-back. It was chaotic, and there were still moments when Italy with a touch more composure or a less frazzled mind might have got in behind an England team that just looks so deliciously attackable pretty much all the time right now.
But generally the story of the extra 30 minutes was a simple one. Could England find a winner, or would we have to experience the horror of more penalties? Just the one penalty, it turned out.
Shortly after Agyemang had been inches away from lifting the roof off the place with a lob from a wildly unlikely angle that clunked off the face of the crossbar, Mead was bundled clumsily to the ground.
It was a soft penalty, but it was a penalty. An Italian side that had spent by this point more than an hour crumbling to the turf under the slightest contact could hardly now turn round and complain at this being visited back upon them at the crucial moment.
Still there was more drama, with Kelly’s penalty a poor one saved by Laura Giuliani, the Italian player perhaps least deserving above all others of her fate tonight, before being tucked home by the taker who then in a further magnificent touch celebrated like actually that had been the precise plan all along. Not just the penalty rebound, but the entire 120 minutes of often agonising torture.
There was something else here, though, that summed England up. Only one other player was close to Kelly as she tapped home that rebound. Ella Toone. After being on the pitch for every single second of this exhausting madness, Toone had the wherewithal and energy to perfectly time a run from deep into the area without encroaching on the off chance the ball might happen to break her way. No Italian matched that desire in that one vital moment.
It was a small thing. A small thing that didn’t even matter in the end. But this England team continue to do enough of these small things, and more of them in the final analysis than their opponents, and make enough of them count that they become a very big deal.
They will be underdogs in the final. They have alarming weaknesses that look ripe for exploiting right now. But they remain a team refusing to accept what appears to be their certain fate, a team able to bend reality itself to their will just when all hope appears lost.
They are both tremendous fun and utterly exhausting to watch. After the late comeback and astonishing shoot-out against Sweden, we really didn’t think they could put us through anything more agonising and still come out on top.
It’s not a mistake we’ll be making again.
